When a contact is created from email, why aren't the first and last name populated?

Environment:

Oracle B2C Service, All versions

Resolution:

When an email is being analyzed by techmail, there are several steps in the creation of the contact. First it verifies if the contact exists. If not, a new contact is created by taking the information from the email header. A standard header includes: From "first_name last_name" < email address > (e.g. From: "John Smith" <john.smith@oracle.com>).

There are some situations in which the first and last name are missing from the header. In these cases, a contact is created without first and last name. This is the standard functionality of the product and all headers should respect the standard in order not to create conflicts between applications.

Cause:

The cause of this behavior is the fact that Barracuda NO_REAL_NAME is fired (due to first and last name missing from header) and it can be verified if the configuration setting to save email headers is enabled (EGW_SAVE_EMAIL_HEADERS) and the header has a similar portion:

X-Barracuda-Spam-Status: No, SCORE=0.00 using per-user scores of TAG_LEVEL=3.5 QUARANTINE_LEVEL=1000.0 KILL_LEVEL=9.0 tests=HTML_MESSAGE, NO_REAL_NAME
X-Barracuda-Spam-Report: Code version 3.2, rules version 3.2.3.27975
    Rule breakdown below
    pts rule name              description
    ---- ---------------------- --------------------------------------------------
    0.00 NO_REAL_NAME          From: does not include a real name
    0.00 HTML_MESSAGE          BODY: HTML included in message

For additional information on the above setting, see Answer ID 1595: Including email headers for incidents created from email.