4 ms·

No reply is better than no-reply

43 points by eoghan 17y ago

olefoo 17y ago
This page kept crashing in Chrome.
- romland 17y ago
  Report it and make $1337? :)
  - olefoo 17y ago
    That's only for when the problem is with Chrome. :-/ I'm pretty sure it was it was badly coded script but I can't be arsed to dissect the webpage and fix it for them.
    - colonelxc 17y ago
      Sounds like a problem with Chrome to me. Browsers (theoretically) are not supposed to crash. If some crazy script can cause them to access memory improperly and crash, that is bad. It doesn't matter that the website is coded poorly, with that opinion, malicious websites are "coded poorly" as well. Now, it doesn't mean that the crash you see is necessarily a security vuln, but it is at least a bug.
      - snprbob86 17y ago
        I see this under Linux. Chrome (big C) doesn't crash, the tab hangs. The browser chrome (little C) is very responsive and the task manager functions as expected. This very well may still be a Chrome bug, but the process isolation works splendidly.
lincolnq 17y ago
Wow. That Amazon email really breaks my expectations. I expect no-reply emails when it is obvious that a robot sent them, but when it's signed with a person's name, I am VERY surprised to see that you can't reply.
joshu 17y ago
un-reply-able email makes me think that there is something intrinsically wrong somewhere. mostly it suggests to me that there is another mode of communication that ought to take that mode of communication over from email.
- gaius 17y ago
  You would be surprised at how many firms, even now, use email + printer to simply continue using the fax workflow they developed in the 80s.
gradschool 17y ago
Hee hee, the same thing happened to me with Amazon. I use more than one email address too. Maybe I should have insisted for security reasons that they write to me only from the email address associated with their customer support department.
cduan 17y ago
I'm all for cutting out the no-reply addresses, but this doesn't seem like the best example. The email is an automated response saying that the sender's address could not be verified, so the message was ignored. If the sender replied to it, then the email would just come from the same sender address, which would still be unverifiable, and then what? I suppose they could set the reply address to some generic support location. But in that case, the best solution would have been to forward the initial (and unverifiable) email to the support location in the first place.
- eoge 17y ago
  Hi. I agree it's not the best example. But it's not an automatic reply. It's happened a few times with different people signing the mail but most importantly, the e-mail address is verified, it just wasn't the address connected with the specific billing enquiry I made. Also, the original mail was sent to their generic support address, as requested on their site (last paragraph): http://aws.amazon.com/tax-help/ http://aws.amazon.com/tax-help/
plaes 17y ago
Could someone understand the first paragraph?
teye 17y ago
Increasing the tracking (letter-spacing in CSS) of body text i.e. choosing a design gimmick over legibility really aggravates me. Inside Facebook does this too.
mseebach 17y ago
No-reply is useful when you want the person on the other end to reply by taking specific actions. I helped an organisation migrate annual dues to e-mail+credit card invoicing. the emails went out from the (active) info@ alias. However, we included a link to get in touch with your local membership officer, to cancel membership etc. which would be completely automated, but we'd get loads of replies relating to those things, and spend quite some time processing those. After we started sending from a no-reply and just included the contact-email in the mail-body, we didn't get a single e-mail related to those. We might have pissed off some people who couldn't be bothered to read beyond the first five words, but I don't really care.
rdtsc 17y ago
Google hiring process has some of this as well. You get to take their personality test and then they send you some messages via the email. I replied but it turns out I was talking to an email bot. It was kind of dissapointing.

43 points by eoghan 17y ago

olefoo 17y ago

This page kept crashing in Chrome.

romland 17y ago
Report it and make $1337? :)
- olefoo 17y ago
  That's only for when the problem is with Chrome. :-/ I'm pretty sure it was it was badly coded script but I can't be arsed to dissect the webpage and fix it for them.
  - colonelxc 17y ago
    Sounds like a problem with Chrome to me. Browsers (theoretically) are not supposed to crash. If some crazy script can cause them to access memory improperly and crash, that is bad. It doesn't matter that the website is coded poorly, with that opinion, malicious websites are "coded poorly" as well. Now, it doesn't mean that the crash you see is necessarily a security vuln, but it is at least a bug.
    - snprbob86 17y ago
      I see this under Linux. Chrome (big C) doesn't crash, the tab hangs. The browser chrome (little C) is very responsive and the task manager functions as expected. This very well may still be a Chrome bug, but the process isolation works splendidly.

lincolnq 17y ago

Wow. That Amazon email really breaks my expectations. I expect no-reply emails when it is obvious that a robot sent them, but when it's signed with a person's name, I am VERY surprised to see that you can't reply.

joshu 17y ago

un-reply-able email makes me think that there is something intrinsically wrong somewhere. mostly it suggests to me that there is another mode of communication that ought to take that mode of communication over from email.

gaius 17y ago
You would be surprised at how many firms, even now, use email + printer to simply continue using the fax workflow they developed in the 80s.

gradschool 17y ago

Hee hee, the same thing happened to me with Amazon. I use more than one email address too. Maybe I should have insisted for security reasons that they write to me only from the email address associated with their customer support department.

cduan 17y ago

I'm all for cutting out the no-reply addresses, but this doesn't seem like the best example. The email is an automated response saying that the sender's address could not be verified, so the message was ignored. If the sender replied to it, then the email would just come from the same sender address, which would still be unverifiable, and then what? I suppose they could set the reply address to some generic support location. But in that case, the best solution would have been to forward the initial (and unverifiable) email to the support location in the first place.

eoge 17y ago
Hi. I agree it's not the best example. But it's not an automatic reply. It's happened a few times with different people signing the mail but most importantly, the e-mail address is verified, it just wasn't the address connected with the specific billing enquiry I made. Also, the original mail was sent to their generic support address, as requested on their site (last paragraph): http://aws.amazon.com/tax-help/ http://aws.amazon.com/tax-help/

plaes 17y ago

Could someone understand the first paragraph?

teye 17y ago

Increasing the tracking (letter-spacing in CSS) of body text i.e. choosing a design gimmick over legibility really aggravates me. Inside Facebook does this too.

mseebach 17y ago

No-reply is useful when you want the person on the other end to reply by taking specific actions. I helped an organisation migrate annual dues to e-mail+credit card invoicing. the emails went out from the (active) info@ alias. However, we included a link to get in touch with your local membership officer, to cancel membership etc. which would be completely automated, but we'd get loads of replies relating to those things, and spend quite some time processing those. After we started sending from a no-reply and just included the contact-email in the mail-body, we didn't get a single e-mail related to those. We might have pissed off some people who couldn't be bothered to read beyond the first five words, but I don't really care.

rdtsc 17y ago

Google hiring process has some of this as well. You get to take their personality test and then they send you some messages via the email. I replied but it turns out I was talking to an email bot. It was kind of dissapointing.