EBS R12 -- forwarded notification emails /Allow Forwarded Response/ Problem encountered when handling an unsolicited email

It is not supported to forward a notification email to any other employee and let him or her reply to this email either for approving or rejecting a request, thus making Workflow inbound processing take action in the database to make the requested thing to be approved or rejected.

Reference Oracle Support:

It is not supported to use the forward functionality in email to forward the approval notification whether it be the Approval Management Engine (AME) or standard approvals.

The act of using the email client forward functionality circumvents Oracle workflow and notification functionality.  By using the Forward function in email to forward the notification, the
ownership of the notification is not changed.   Whomever responds to the email will not be registered in the po_action_history table

The way for preventing the forwarded emails to be processed by the workflow mailer (inbound processor, imap processor), is to disable Allow Forwarded Responses by unchecking the related checkbox presented in the Workflow mailer configuration page, as shown in figure below;

By unchecking the Allow Forwarded Responses, we can make Notification mailer's Inbound processor not to process the forwarded emails.

But , the users can still forward their notification emails to other right? That is; we can't do anything in the client email tool.

So the users who receives these notification emails can still continue to respond these notification emails.

What about these emails then? The answer is ; our notification mailer just won't process them.

What will notification mailer do with these emails then? The expected behaviour : the workflow mailer should take these emails to the DISCARD folder.

Is it so in real life?

No it is not :)

There is a bug and that's why I write this blog post:)

The problem we say even in EBS 12.2 environment is depicted in the error below;

oracle.apps.fnd.wf.mailer.IMAPResponseHandler.handleUnsolicited(EmailParser)]:Problem encountered when handling an unsolicited email -> Could not connect to SMTP host: someip, port: someport, response: -1

The questions can be ? IMAPResponsHandler doing SMTP? Isnt it inbound? So what is the relation with SMTP? It should be doing IMAP rather than smtp? The answer for these question is; Inbound can do Smtp too. Inbound does SMTP when sending unsolicited, second answer and invalid emails.

The action for fixing this in EBS 12.2 environment is applying patch 22198191:R12.OWF.C 1OFF:12.2.4:20137109:MAILER NOT USING CORRECT SMTP CONFIGURATION FOR UNSOLICITED MAIL

The fix is delivered with the note; 

Automatic Reply To Unsolicited Mail shows erros 530 5.7.1 Client was not authenticated (Doc ID 1991613.1)

Don't give attention to the above error message(it says Client was not authenticated there), as the things given in above document will fix the issue.