My guess is that what's happening is that they've taken the one-time
address generated by WDTK for the first request, and then stored that
in their system as your address, and any subsequent requests from you
are being replied to that address. Or, more simply, whoever is replying
is just looking for "Paul Perrin" in their Outlook address book and
taking the first match.
(I am making an awful lot of assumptions about how things work currently
here but...)
What about instead of sending the message from
"Paul Perrin <[email protected]>"
You do
"Paul Perrin [Title of FOIA Request] <[email protected]>"
We have the same problem with FillThatHole.org.uk where we use "plus
addressing" [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plus_address#Sub-addressing] to
try to get replies to be linked to the correct hazards. So a report for
hazard 1234 would have "From" and "Reply-To" set to
<[email protected]>
This works very nicely for almost all councils, where they simply store
the email address as-is, or reply directly using standard email software.
So you could perhaps use a From address for the above example like "Paul
Perrin <[email protected]>" - where foiid is the ID of the
actual request.
But some councils have "clever" systems, that appear to understand
plus-addressing, so mail from <[email protected]> is
assigned to a customer record with the email address
<[email protected]>, which does make sense for their records.
But replies then come back without the hazard ID in the address.
Other councils sadly reply manually to the wrong address, so they'll reply
to <[email protected]> about hazard ID 2345. This REALLY
messes things up!
I'm hoping that we'll be using Open311 web services with more and more
councils as time goes on, so we can cut out the human beings. But change
is very slow.
Cheers!
Anthony
--
www.fonant.com - Quality web sites
Tel. 01903 867 810
Fonant Ltd is registered in England and Wales, company No. 7006596
Registered office: Amelia House, Crescent Road, Worthing, West Sussex,
BN11 1QR
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