Email To Print Aliasing with Microsoft Exchange

Customers using our Email to Print feature with a Microsoft Exchange Server report that they will get emails bounced back stating “Your Email to Print job was received, but the printer’s email address was not recognized. Please check the email and try again”. This is because Microsoft Exchange modifies the email address header information, which subsequently affects PaperCut’s ability to detect the printer alias to which the email was originally sent.

Within PaperCut, we have two Email address settings:

1. Global address (the mailbox which PaperCut checks for Emails):
   (found in the PaperCut admin interface, under Options > Mobile & BYOD > Email to Print > Username)

2. Printer-specific alias (the address that identifies to which printer the job should be sent):
   (found in the PaperCut admin interface, under Printers > (affected printer) > Email to Print > Email Address)

Aliases can get removed by 3rd party email systems

Aliases are set up in Exchange or Gmail - outside of the PaperCut software. Some email systems, like Microsoft Exchange, strip the alias address from the header and replace it with the end-destination email address.

The To: field will always show the global email address: printers@school.edu
Rather than the printer-specific aliases: printer1@school.edu

If you login to the Global mailbox and examine the Header information in an email, do you see the printer-specific alias, or the global address? If you see the global address, and the printer-specific alias has been stripped, those clients won’t be able to use an alias with Email to Print.

Workaround:

One workaround found by one of our customers is to use distribution groups - for example in the case above, you would set up a distribution list called printer1@school.edu - then add printers@school.edu as the only member of that DL. When you send a test email to that DL, it should then retain the DL name - i.e. printer1@school.edu in the ‘To:’ field of the email.