How best to customize mail from header "From: Default Org Team <[email protected]>"

[BenSturmfels]

Hi Folks,
I see that when I click "resend a payment receipt to yourself", the email generated has the header "From: Default Org Team [email protected]". I see that this is configured in config/application.rb, so I can obviously customize it there, but is that the recommended approach - maintaining untracked changes to to config/application.rb?

Would it perhaps make sense for the outgoing mail to come from the "org email" that's set up under Settings?

[wwahammy]

Hi @BenSturmfels:

Generally, to date, receipts come from a single email address for an Houdini instance and it would be set in the config/houdini_config.rb at config.houdini.hoster.support_email. This value defaults to whatever is in config/application.rb. At runtime, you can get this value by calling Houdini.hoster.support_email.

The reasoning for having a single receipt email is mostly historical: if someone runs an Houdini instance and allows external nonprofits to join, it's difficult to send using the nonprofit's own domain as you won't have the proper SPF and DKIM records set up.

If one didn't worry about that OR an Houdini instance owner set up the appropriate DNS records for each nonprofit that has a receipt, then one could use the org email. That said, the org email is an optional property under settings and it's really mostly there for displaying on the Nonprofit's main donation page on the instance.

I'm open to the idea of having nonprofits be able to set their own receipt email addresses. We'd have to have a way to configure whether to allow that and we might not want to have the "org email" value do double duty but it's something we can think about.

[BenSturmfels]

Thanks Eric, that makes sense. When overriding the default config.houdini.hoster.support_email, is config/houdini_config.rb literally the right place to put this change on a production system? (not committed to version control)

[BenSturmfels]

Heh, thanks chatbot. ;)