In this article I’ll try to give you an easy view of what’s the Reply-To field, and a common issue that you may find specifically if you’re using Gmail/G Suite as email client, althought you can find userful information also if you’re experiencing this issue with any other email client.
What’s the Reply-To field?
Its name explain by itself, it’s a field where you put an email address that should be used to reply the email. An extended version of the field name would be “reply to this address not to the one in the from address!”.
Do you want a more technical explanation? Ok, per RFC 5322, the technical document that sets the starndard for emails, the Reply-To field is part of the originator fields for an email and:
When the “Reply-To:” field is present, it
indicates the address(es) to which the author of the message suggests
that replies be sent. In the absence of the “Reply-To:” field,
replies SHOULD by default be sent to the mailbox(es) specified in the
“From:” field unless otherwise specified by the person composing the
reply.
Pay attention to the word suggests in the above quote from the RFC document, it’s important. That means your email client is not required to follow your indication.
How to use it?
Just put whatever valid email address(es) you want on it. That’s all buddy! No special setup needed, no magic, it’s just another field of the email message where you put an email address, just like the From or the To fields.
This means an important thing. It doesn’t matter what you’re using to create the email, it can be an email client, a WordPress plugin or whatever, as long as the email created by the software you’re using has the email address you wanted in the Reply-To field, its job is done. If your email client is not using the Reply-To address, that’s a completely different story.