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Display names but not email addresses in GAL

  • 1 cavab
  • 1 has this problem
  • 1 view
  • Last reply by Zenos

SigmaDan
SigmaDan
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Hi all,

I have tried searching google, forums and other sources for an answer to my question but always seem to come up with the same answers which relate to hiding a contact in the GAL.

Short history - We are a school that has sadly in the past had issues with teachers leaving with lists of customers and then emailing/stealing said customers when they join another company.... Complicated issue (and laws) (and yes, they are breaking their contract) but the end result is a set of nervous directors.

What I need to do - We want to be able to provide a GAL to our teachers and staff containing all of our customer contacts but do not want them to be able to see the email addresses, only their names. We are currently looking at doing this on our new admin system (web based CRM with a button to email that hides any addresses) but this is in development and may take a while. We currently use Thunderbird (using profiles) for our teachers and would love a solution using this client.

Any ideas,

Thank you in advance for any advice or answers.

Daniel Le Beau

Hi all, I have tried searching google, forums and other sources for an answer to my question but always seem to come up with the same answers which relate to hiding a contact in the GAL. Short history - We are a school that has sadly in the past had issues with teachers leaving with lists of customers and then emailing/stealing said customers when they join another company.... Complicated issue (and laws) (and yes, they are breaking their contract) but the end result is a set of nervous directors. What I need to do - We want to be able to provide a GAL to our teachers and staff containing all of our customer contacts but do not want them to be able to see the email addresses, only their names. We are currently looking at doing this on our new admin system (web based CRM with a button to email that hides any addresses) but this is in development and may take a while. We currently use Thunderbird (using profiles) for our teachers and would love a solution using this client. Any ideas, Thank you in advance for any advice or answers. Daniel Le Beau

All Replies (1)

Zenos
Zenos
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A regular email client needs addresses to send to. You'd have to deliberately hide all such addresses and you'd have to do it in composition, sent and incoming messages.

And I can't see how you could stop your staff Cc'ing to a personal account so as to be able to harvest the addresses elsewhere.

I think you'd need a sort of smtp proxy that took your messages from Thunderbird and filled in the addresses en route, after the message had left Thunderbird. You'd need some unique way of identifying each addressee so it knew which address to insert.

Rather than removing addresses outright, you might be able to obfuscate them (there are various ways of encoding URLS that might work with email addresses too) but I still can't see how you'd stop copies being Cc'd to another account. And you'd probably still have to intercept and redact addresses on incoming mail too.

All in all, you're asking to disable a fundamental component of standard email. I suspect you have to wait for your CRM to come online.