9 ms·

Let’s kill no-reply

233 points by 0xdeadbeefbabe 9y ago

eridius 9y ago
Companies should definitely have an easily-discovered means of contacting them if you have a concern about an email you received. But actually allowing replies to the email itself is just asking to get a lot of low-quality spammy replies that now you have to pay someone to wade through.
- benjohnson 9y ago
  And a crazy amount of "I'm on vacation" auto replies.
  - ape4 9y ago
    We could have a mail field indicating if vacation replies are wanted. X-WantVacationReplies: no
    - kazinator 9y ago
      Or headers in the auto-reply mail which tag it as being auto-reply. These exist! https://stackoverflow.com/a/10839343/1250772 https://stackoverflow.com/a/10839343/1250772 This answer points at RFC containing recommendations for auto-reply e-mails, and specifies a header to use. Any new proposal will fall victim to the same opt-in problem to an even greater degree; if developers of auto-responders can't be bothered to follow this RFC, they will also ignore even newer recommendations.
    - bitJericho 9y ago
      or.. you know, a reply-to header where real emails can be sent to...
      - sp332 9y ago
        But if I'm on vacation, I don't want to read your email right now. I'm just letting you know that your email might not get a reply, especially not any time soon.
        kybernetikos 9y ago
        Yeah, it seems like it's providing meta-information about the status of the email address owner rather than actually conveying information from the owner of the email address. Perhaps there should be a separate channel for such meta information.
- mikehall314 9y ago
  And bounces, and out of office autoresponders, and so on
  - STRML 9y ago
    We do it anyway. It's easy enough to filter those types of emails. I think it's a huge plus for customer service to be able to say "Have a problem or question? Just reply..."
    - mikehall314 9y ago
      Sure. And I think that's a better approach, on balance.
    - nsxwolf 9y ago
      How do you know if you've been filtered? Not getting a response would lead to a lot of frustration.
      - STRML 9y ago
        We only set really obvious filters, as to filter too little than too much. But of course, it's not perfect every time.
    - bitJericho 9y ago
      Having worked in email queues, filters are nowhere near good enough. Nothing is more infuriating than wasting hours on bounces.
- eloisant 9y ago
  If you have a good quality customer support/CRM tool it should take care of the most obvious, connect to the corresponding customer, and be easy to manage.
- zeveb 9y ago
  > But actually allowing replies to the email itself is just asking to get a lot of low-quality spammy replies that now you have to pay someone to wade through. If I give them my personal email address (risking low-quality spammy email) then they should at least give me a real corporate address when they send me an email, accepting the risk of a low-quality spammy reply. That's power symmetry.
eloisant 9y ago
It's actually very easy, just feed the responses to your customer support service. Since it's an email you know, it will be associated to the customer account. Not only it's good for the customers, it's good for you because you definitely want customers to contact you when they have a problem (or when they believe you're sending too many emails). You want them to contact you to give you a chance to make them happy customer who stay with you, not grumpy customer who quit your service before even giving you an opportunity to fix their problem.
- mjevans 9y ago
  For both customers and 'potential customers' you'd need classification staff to categorize the mail. Their jobs might be made easier by machine learning providing them a guess to confirm, but it is important to have a human involved as actually intelligent verification (and additional training in some cases). Obviously non-customers would be fed over to either sales directly or a Sales Engineer.
- bitJericho 9y ago
  I've worked email queues. The customer's account will be full of auto-responders and it'll be impossible to find the real communications.
  - BillinghamJ 9y ago
    That's highly disingenuous. Unless you've been spamming your users, it's typical that less than 1% of emails are automated responses. These can be deleted/skipped very quickly. In my company's case, it's more like 0.1%, but perhaps some are higher.
    - ChristianBundy 9y ago
      Not to mention how easy it is to filter auto-replies. If you receive an office with the strong "out of the office" or "vacation" within ten seconds of sending the email, you can be reasonably sure that it's an automated reply.
0xdeadbeefbabe 9y ago
If slack can disrupt chat, then maybe another company can disrupt no-reply. I feel like this predicament resembles the story in the children's book: Half Magic (http://a.co/e8JrhbU http://a.co/e8JrhbU).
Chirael 9y ago
Perhaps startups should send email from replieswelcome@startup.com to encourage customer feedback and iterate faster? As pg wrote in Do Things that Don't Scale, "The feedback you get from engaging directly with your earliest users will be the best you ever get... That's one advantage of being small: you can provide a level of service no big company can."
- steventhedev 9y ago
  For a smaller startup (< 10 people), I'd recommend going with a person's email. Bonus points if you use your own. We do that and get the occasional reply, but when we do, people are usually happy to get a quick, personal response. Once you're larger, using more purpose-suited emails that route correctly is better (e.g. marketing@example.com or billing@example.com routed to the correct customer service teams).
  - reaperducer 9y ago
    I've seen this done a few places. They all used simply "hi@example.com" for their reply-tos.
  - stordoff 9y ago
    Possibly a personal quirk of mine, but I've never really liked that for automated emails. Getting an automated sign-up email from name@company just feels disingenuous to me. Similar with the hi@company suggested below - I've seen hello@company used a lot (PR companies seem to love it) and always found it weird to not know who (person or role) I am addressing.
    - steventhedev 9y ago
      I always tack on a "this email is automated, but responses will be read by a human". You can also set the reply to header for a person/role, so you could use accounts@example.com.
petraeus 9y ago
If a customer really wants to contact you they'll find a way. Life always finds a way.
- NegativeK 9y ago
  Sometimes getting communication from a customer who only kind of wants to contact you is well worth the effort.
- zwerdlds 9y ago
  Let me know how it works when you have a problem with your Google (or any number of other company) account.
- eropple 9y ago
  Why would you want to talk only to customers who "really want" to talk to you? Instead of all your customers, who are a superset of that group and don't always have the same needs?
- fragmede 9y ago
  What about all the emails that get sent to people who aren't customers yet and just have a simple question that isn't covered by the FAQ? They'll see noreply@, and not bother to dig up a support email address and forget about your company's offerings. However, seeing a welcoming replieswelcome@ email, they can ask their simple question while they're thinking of it, which then becomes a warm lead, and possibly even convert into a paying customer.
- sigzero 9y ago
  I did get the Ian Malcolm reference.
  - hinkley 9y ago
    I always preferred his line from he sequel: "Oooh, Ahh", that's how it always starts. But then later there's running, and screaming.
dylanpyle 9y ago
I've seen noreply@ useful/necessary in cases where the original message contained sensitive information that you wouldn't want forwarded to support staff if someone chose to reply.
- mattlondon 9y ago
  There are some products that will help you strip that information out automatically, e.g. https://cloud.google.com/dlp/ https://cloud.google.com/dlp/ Demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXTCIDbLdfw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXTCIDbLdfw Others probably exist, but that is the one I know about.
  - tehlike 9y ago
    Stripping is prone to human errors. Noreply as a blanket is probably less so.
    - mattlondon 9y ago
      That service is not done by humans :-)
      - rainbowmverse 9y ago
        Humans build their flaws into their machines.
      - tehlike 9y ago
        Well... Who identifies whar to strip? Who ensures that an email that is sent by an engineer in a department will definitely go through the sanitization? Like another poster said, people can build their flaws into machines.
- jacobparker 9y ago
  That's sounds pretty easy to solve redacting the sensitive content when it hits your mail server before going to support staff. If you're sending out HTML email you can also make easy and extensible by having a custom class for redactable contents. Realistically customers are going to fwd those emails anyway so this approach is more robust. It seems like most information in these emails would be available to support staff typically though. It sounds like a niche case.
ninov 9y ago
Companies often use noreply@… as sender and add a real address as Reply-To so their staff does not have to deal with bounce messages.
- nwah1 9y ago
  Hackish workarounds will be the death of us.
  - bitJericho 9y ago
    Hackish? This is a great design: http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Mail-Headers.html http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Mai...
    - KGIII 9y ago
      As near ad I can tell, the whole damned Internet is pretty much hackish workarounds. It's not amazing when something breaks, it's amazing that it works at all. From HTML being used for more than markup, to NAT routing, to a complete disregard for standards... It's kinda impressive, actually.
- zbuf 9y ago
  Yes, we do this; it seems to be both the correct solution, and one which works effectively in practice -- use email properly. Auto responders generally send their messages to the mail Sender. That seems correct to me. We send automated mail from robot@, with a Reply-to of support@ -- because that's logically what's happening. All of bounces just end up back at the robot, and IMO that's where they belong (and potentially can even be dealt with automatically). The vast majority of out-of-office do that too. And humans end up emailing support. The name 'robot' was chosen to gently imply to the user a few things.
kazinator 9y ago
I wholeheartedly agree with these bloggers in despising the "noreply" practice, and here is a rule in my Exim mail server config that I've had there for years: deny message = MYDOM does not accept SMTP traffic from "noreply" senders. \ E-mail is a "two-way street". \ If you want us to accept \ your mail, then please accept replies. senders = ^.*noreply.*\$ : ^.*do.*not.*reply.*\$ Unfortunately, this has to be immediately followed by a whitelist: !senders = *@sourceforge.net : github.com : [ ... others ]
- bitJericho 9y ago
  Having managed email queues, the no reply email is essential, because everyone and their uncle uses auto replies. That said, I'm all for including a real email address somewhere so a user can reply.
  - pavel_lishin 9y ago
    Ah, the old "Be liberal in what you send out, be conservative in what you receive" approach.
    - bitJericho 9y ago
      If you want to waste money on resolving 6 month out of date vacation replies than be my guest.
      - corobo 9y ago
        I'd rather have the mail admin spend a moment or two putting in a rule that ignores autoreplies e.g. in another response someone linked https://github.com/jpmckinney/multi_mail/wiki/Detecting-autoresponders https://github.com/jpmckinney/multi_mail/wiki/Detecting-auto...
      - wott 9y ago
        It's been resolved for many years.
bitJericho 9y ago
TLDR, an article by someone who doesn't know how email works nor how companies use email queues.
- iffycan 9y ago
  Author here. I'm writing from the perspective of a customer. As a customer, I don't care how your email queues work. I do care that you sent me an email and forbid me from replying to it. It chafes. And you want my money? From the perspective of a company, I can sympathize. I've been directed to create noreply-sending mailers in the course of my job. In every case, it would have been better sent from support@, but because of understandable but dumb reasons (bureaucratic laziness; not-my-problem-itis), it's way easier just to turn on the mailing hose and forget replies. So that's what we did. I've also worked on handling bounces of both email replies and (cringe) faxes. Yes, handling bounces can be annoying, but to create a good customer experience I think it's worth the cost.
  - bitJericho 9y ago
    I agree, but I think it's best to just have an email address right at the top of the email for a customer to reply to, or use the reply-to headers.
  - snarf21 9y ago
    I hope I don't seem critical because that is not my intent. It seems like this is about misusing no-reply@ not that no-reply@ is inherently bad. Github completing a merge of a branch onto master seems like a fine use case for no-reply@. Using no-reply@ to tell someone they are overdue on their bill is not. Or are you saying there is literally never a reason for a no-reply@ address? Additionally, if a service is over sending, there are lots of unsubscribe laws and rules to address that to your own personal preference.
    - iffycan 9y ago
      I won't say never. I think your distinction (GitHub merge vs bill overdue) might strike the right balance, but I'm having trouble sorting out what the principle is that distinguishes those two. As I've never even paid attention to the sending address of GitHub merge notifications, perhaps the principle is: "If someone notices that your email came from noreply@ then you shouldn't use noreply@" (And, no, you don't seem critical -- more like thoughtful)
jenscow 9y ago
It's done to prevent a loop where an automated response causes an automated response.
- warrenski 9y ago
  Not sure this is entirely true. RFC 3848 (http://www.rfc-base.org/txt/rfc-3834.txt http://www.rfc-base.org/txt/rfc-3834.txt) covers the implementation detail, and a lot of consideration was given to the prevention of email loops. Section 4 states that auto-responders should send the response to the email address given by the Return-Path header (usually set to a VERP address for identification of bounces) or if absent then fall back to the email address given in the From header.
janwh 9y ago
Thank god, a Medium post on how to fix email. Guess that's fixed now, isn't it? /s
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
tscs37 9y ago
I've personally setup noreply accounts for some selfhosted services. These emails are truly noreply, there is no inbox, any incoming mail is blackholed. There is no sense in receiving it, it's automated and the software does not react to incoming mails. There is no reason to reply, there is no sense in replying, there is no way to reply, why demand the ability to reply? Why would I have me reading the garbage that piles up there? If you have a problem, contact postmaster/webmaster/root/etc. If I send you mail from a real human account, you can reply there. Simple as that. It seems a bit like someone demanding that the radio should respond to their choice of music. Sure, if you want that, get a music app (aka a meat-email) and stop listening to the radio (aka the machine-email)
- sp332 9y ago
  Why not send the email "From" postmaster/webmaster etc in the first place, or at least set the Reply-To header to that?
  - tscs37 9y ago
    Because there is no reason for it. If you have a problem there is a contact email in every mail included. I do not feel like I should be sending mail from postmaster and the reply-to header does not feel any more appropriate. These emails are 100 percent automatic and do not require you to reply. Ever.
- hinkley 9y ago
  It would seem like over a long enough time horizon a significant fraction of the email you send is going to go to dead email addresses. Wouldn't it make sense once in a while to turn on receipt to see how bad your bounce rate is instead of ignoring it?
  - tscs37 9y ago
    Not really. There is no reason for anyone to reply. As far as I'm aware from logs I only get about 10 Mails per month in these addresses. And I'm truly not interested in what someone has to say to an email that says "noreply"
jklein11 9y ago
This seems like a problem that could be solved by micropayments for sending and receiving emails. I've seen proposals[1] for a solution where the sender of an email pays a small fee to the recipient of the email. If you are sending as much email as you are receiving you wouldn't have to worry about using up your email. If you are sending a mass email, you will end up paying for it. In the case of no-replies, it would discourage the sender from sending an email that doesn't need to be replied to.
Walkman 9y ago
I always wondered why is this and I think it's just a habit and somebody do it because everybody else is doing it.
- hinkley 9y ago
  Fake it until you make it.
sparrish 9y ago
We decided against 'no-reply' emails when we started our business 6 years ago and it's been a great way to get our customers to engage with us. Every email we send out has a blurb like this: "Please let us know if you have any questions. You may reply to this email or reach us at support@..." Yes, we get some bounces and vacation/out of office auto-replies but the benefits far outweigh having to delete a few auto-replies that got through the filters.
- tmnvix 9y ago
  Are you dealing with 10s, 100s, or 1000s of customers?
  - sparrish 9y ago
    1000s
- Silhouette 9y ago
  Yes, we get some bounces and vacation/out of office auto-replies but the benefits far outweigh having to delete a few auto-replies that got through the filters. This has been our experience as well, though maybe it's different for purely B2B communications. We're mostly B2C, and we've never found out-of-office replies to be a significant problem.
mv4 9y ago
I agree wholeheartedly. This practice is up there with "No Caller ID" calls.
vmarquet 9y ago
"Don’t make me hunt for a way to ask it." And this post makes me hunt google to find what "kthxbye" means...
honi 9y ago
Send as noreply@ with reply-to header pointing to a valid address.
jpalomaki 9y ago
This certainly also has to do with the value of the customer. If you are an insurance company the value of the customer may be measured in thousands of $$$. If you are a lean e-commerce middleman the value you extract from ordinary end-customer might be some cents. Engaging with the customer in email conversation may cost tens of dollars. While customers may love email, some (many?) customer service people actually don't. The trouble I have heard couple of times is that with email you usually never manage to solve the issue in one pass. Customer fires off email with insufficient details. Your service center checks the case, asks for more details. Customer does not respond immediately. When the reply comes, the person who originally handled the cases is not at work or has forgotten the details. You can call up the customer - if the customer has provided you the number, but that has it's own challenges. Customer can't talk right now, you need to call back at certain time etc. In some cases it simply does not work out financially to provide personalized customer service. Too many customers are so cheap that they prefer to deal with your competitor who automates things.

Companies should definitely have an easily-discovered means of contacting them if you have a concern about an email you received. But actually allowing replies to the email itself is just asking to get a lot of low-quality spammy replies that now you have to pay someone to wade through.

benjohnson 9y ago
And a crazy amount of "I'm on vacation" auto replies.
- ape4 9y ago
  We could have a mail field indicating if vacation replies are wanted. X-WantVacationReplies: no
  - kazinator 9y ago
    Or headers in the auto-reply mail which tag it as being auto-reply. These exist! https://stackoverflow.com/a/10839343/1250772 https://stackoverflow.com/a/10839343/1250772 This answer points at RFC containing recommendations for auto-reply e-mails, and specifies a header to use. Any new proposal will fall victim to the same opt-in problem to an even greater degree; if developers of auto-responders can't be bothered to follow this RFC, they will also ignore even newer recommendations.
  - bitJericho 9y ago
    or.. you know, a reply-to header where real emails can be sent to...
    - sp332 9y ago
      But if I'm on vacation, I don't want to read your email right now. I'm just letting you know that your email might not get a reply, especially not any time soon.
      - kybernetikos 9y ago
        Yeah, it seems like it's providing meta-information about the status of the email address owner rather than actually conveying information from the owner of the email address. Perhaps there should be a separate channel for such meta information.
mikehall314 9y ago
And bounces, and out of office autoresponders, and so on
- STRML 9y ago
  We do it anyway. It's easy enough to filter those types of emails. I think it's a huge plus for customer service to be able to say "Have a problem or question? Just reply..."
  - mikehall314 9y ago
    Sure. And I think that's a better approach, on balance.
  - nsxwolf 9y ago
    How do you know if you've been filtered? Not getting a response would lead to a lot of frustration.
    - STRML 9y ago
      We only set really obvious filters, as to filter too little than too much. But of course, it's not perfect every time.
  - bitJericho 9y ago
    Having worked in email queues, filters are nowhere near good enough. Nothing is more infuriating than wasting hours on bounces.
eloisant 9y ago
If you have a good quality customer support/CRM tool it should take care of the most obvious, connect to the corresponding customer, and be easy to manage.
zeveb 9y ago
> But actually allowing replies to the email itself is just asking to get a lot of low-quality spammy replies that now you have to pay someone to wade through. If I give them my personal email address (risking low-quality spammy email) then they should at least give me a real corporate address when they send me an email, accepting the risk of a low-quality spammy reply. That's power symmetry.

eloisant 9y ago

It's actually very easy, just feed the responses to your customer support service. Since it's an email you know, it will be associated to the customer account. Not only it's good for the customers, it's good for you because you definitely want customers to contact you when they have a problem (or when they believe you're sending too many emails). You want them to contact you to give you a chance to make them happy customer who stay with you, not grumpy customer who quit your service before even giving you an opportunity to fix their problem.

mjevans 9y ago
For both customers and 'potential customers' you'd need classification staff to categorize the mail. Their jobs might be made easier by machine learning providing them a guess to confirm, but it is important to have a human involved as actually intelligent verification (and additional training in some cases). Obviously non-customers would be fed over to either sales directly or a Sales Engineer.
bitJericho 9y ago
I've worked email queues. The customer's account will be full of auto-responders and it'll be impossible to find the real communications.
- BillinghamJ 9y ago
  That's highly disingenuous. Unless you've been spamming your users, it's typical that less than 1% of emails are automated responses. These can be deleted/skipped very quickly. In my company's case, it's more like 0.1%, but perhaps some are higher.
  - ChristianBundy 9y ago
    Not to mention how easy it is to filter auto-replies. If you receive an office with the strong "out of the office" or "vacation" within ten seconds of sending the email, you can be reasonably sure that it's an automated reply.

0xdeadbeefbabe 9y ago

If slack can disrupt chat, then maybe another company can disrupt no-reply. I feel like this predicament resembles the story in the children's book: Half Magic (http://a.co/e8JrhbU http://a.co/e8JrhbU).

Chirael 9y ago

Perhaps startups should send email from replieswelcome@startup.com to encourage customer feedback and iterate faster? As pg wrote in Do Things that Don't Scale, "The feedback you get from engaging directly with your earliest users will be the best you ever get... That's one advantage of being small: you can provide a level of service no big company can."

steventhedev 9y ago
For a smaller startup (< 10 people), I'd recommend going with a person's email. Bonus points if you use your own. We do that and get the occasional reply, but when we do, people are usually happy to get a quick, personal response. Once you're larger, using more purpose-suited emails that route correctly is better (e.g. marketing@example.com or billing@example.com routed to the correct customer service teams).
- reaperducer 9y ago
  I've seen this done a few places. They all used simply "hi@example.com" for their reply-tos.
- stordoff 9y ago
  Possibly a personal quirk of mine, but I've never really liked that for automated emails. Getting an automated sign-up email from name@company just feels disingenuous to me. Similar with the hi@company suggested below - I've seen hello@company used a lot (PR companies seem to love it) and always found it weird to not know who (person or role) I am addressing.
  - steventhedev 9y ago
    I always tack on a "this email is automated, but responses will be read by a human". You can also set the reply to header for a person/role, so you could use accounts@example.com.

petraeus 9y ago

If a customer really wants to contact you they'll find a way. Life always finds a way.

NegativeK 9y ago
Sometimes getting communication from a customer who only kind of wants to contact you is well worth the effort.
zwerdlds 9y ago
Let me know how it works when you have a problem with your Google (or any number of other company) account.
eropple 9y ago
Why would you want to talk only to customers who "really want" to talk to you? Instead of all your customers, who are a superset of that group and don't always have the same needs?
fragmede 9y ago
What about all the emails that get sent to people who aren't customers yet and just have a simple question that isn't covered by the FAQ? They'll see noreply@, and not bother to dig up a support email address and forget about your company's offerings. However, seeing a welcoming replieswelcome@ email, they can ask their simple question while they're thinking of it, which then becomes a warm lead, and possibly even convert into a paying customer.
sigzero 9y ago
I did get the Ian Malcolm reference.
- hinkley 9y ago
  I always preferred his line from he sequel: "Oooh, Ahh", that's how it always starts. But then later there's running, and screaming.

dylanpyle 9y ago

I've seen noreply@ useful/necessary in cases where the original message contained sensitive information that you wouldn't want forwarded to support staff if someone chose to reply.

mattlondon 9y ago
There are some products that will help you strip that information out automatically, e.g. https://cloud.google.com/dlp/ https://cloud.google.com/dlp/ Demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXTCIDbLdfw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXTCIDbLdfw Others probably exist, but that is the one I know about.
- tehlike 9y ago
  Stripping is prone to human errors. Noreply as a blanket is probably less so.
  - mattlondon 9y ago
    That service is not done by humans :-)
    - rainbowmverse 9y ago
      Humans build their flaws into their machines.
    - tehlike 9y ago
      Well... Who identifies whar to strip? Who ensures that an email that is sent by an engineer in a department will definitely go through the sanitization? Like another poster said, people can build their flaws into machines.
jacobparker 9y ago
That's sounds pretty easy to solve redacting the sensitive content when it hits your mail server before going to support staff. If you're sending out HTML email you can also make easy and extensible by having a custom class for redactable contents. Realistically customers are going to fwd those emails anyway so this approach is more robust. It seems like most information in these emails would be available to support staff typically though. It sounds like a niche case.

ninov 9y ago

Companies often use noreply@… as sender and add a real address as Reply-To so their staff does not have to deal with bounce messages.

nwah1 9y ago
Hackish workarounds will be the death of us.
- bitJericho 9y ago
  Hackish? This is a great design: http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Mail-Headers.html http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Mai...
  - KGIII 9y ago
    As near ad I can tell, the whole damned Internet is pretty much hackish workarounds. It's not amazing when something breaks, it's amazing that it works at all. From HTML being used for more than markup, to NAT routing, to a complete disregard for standards... It's kinda impressive, actually.
zbuf 9y ago
Yes, we do this; it seems to be both the correct solution, and one which works effectively in practice -- use email properly. Auto responders generally send their messages to the mail Sender. That seems correct to me. We send automated mail from robot@, with a Reply-to of support@ -- because that's logically what's happening. All of bounces just end up back at the robot, and IMO that's where they belong (and potentially can even be dealt with automatically). The vast majority of out-of-office do that too. And humans end up emailing support. The name 'robot' was chosen to gently imply to the user a few things.

kazinator 9y ago

I wholeheartedly agree with these bloggers in despising the "noreply" practice, and here is a rule in my Exim mail server config that I've had there for years: deny message = MYDOM does not accept SMTP traffic from "noreply" senders. \ E-mail is a "two-way street". \ If you want us to accept \ your mail, then please accept replies. senders = ^.*noreply.*\$ : ^.*do.*not.*reply.*\$ Unfortunately, this has to be immediately followed by a whitelist: !senders = *@sourceforge.net : github.com : [ ... others ]

bitJericho 9y ago
Having managed email queues, the no reply email is essential, because everyone and their uncle uses auto replies. That said, I'm all for including a real email address somewhere so a user can reply.
- pavel_lishin 9y ago
  Ah, the old "Be liberal in what you send out, be conservative in what you receive" approach.
  - bitJericho 9y ago
    If you want to waste money on resolving 6 month out of date vacation replies than be my guest.
    - corobo 9y ago
      I'd rather have the mail admin spend a moment or two putting in a rule that ignores autoreplies e.g. in another response someone linked https://github.com/jpmckinney/multi_mail/wiki/Detecting-autoresponders https://github.com/jpmckinney/multi_mail/wiki/Detecting-auto...
    - wott 9y ago
      It's been resolved for many years.

bitJericho 9y ago

TLDR, an article by someone who doesn't know how email works nor how companies use email queues.

iffycan 9y ago
Author here. I'm writing from the perspective of a customer. As a customer, I don't care how your email queues work. I do care that you sent me an email and forbid me from replying to it. It chafes. And you want my money? From the perspective of a company, I can sympathize. I've been directed to create noreply-sending mailers in the course of my job. In every case, it would have been better sent from support@, but because of understandable but dumb reasons (bureaucratic laziness; not-my-problem-itis), it's way easier just to turn on the mailing hose and forget replies. So that's what we did. I've also worked on handling bounces of both email replies and (cringe) faxes. Yes, handling bounces can be annoying, but to create a good customer experience I think it's worth the cost.
- bitJericho 9y ago
  I agree, but I think it's best to just have an email address right at the top of the email for a customer to reply to, or use the reply-to headers.
- snarf21 9y ago
  I hope I don't seem critical because that is not my intent. It seems like this is about misusing no-reply@ not that no-reply@ is inherently bad. Github completing a merge of a branch onto master seems like a fine use case for no-reply@. Using no-reply@ to tell someone they are overdue on their bill is not. Or are you saying there is literally never a reason for a no-reply@ address? Additionally, if a service is over sending, there are lots of unsubscribe laws and rules to address that to your own personal preference.
  - iffycan 9y ago
    I won't say never. I think your distinction (GitHub merge vs bill overdue) might strike the right balance, but I'm having trouble sorting out what the principle is that distinguishes those two. As I've never even paid attention to the sending address of GitHub merge notifications, perhaps the principle is: "If someone notices that your email came from noreply@ then you shouldn't use noreply@" (And, no, you don't seem critical -- more like thoughtful)

jenscow 9y ago

It's done to prevent a loop where an automated response causes an automated response.

warrenski 9y ago
Not sure this is entirely true. RFC 3848 (http://www.rfc-base.org/txt/rfc-3834.txt http://www.rfc-base.org/txt/rfc-3834.txt) covers the implementation detail, and a lot of consideration was given to the prevention of email loops. Section 4 states that auto-responders should send the response to the email address given by the Return-Path header (usually set to a VERP address for identification of bounces) or if absent then fall back to the email address given in the From header.

janwh 9y ago

Thank god, a Medium post on how to fix email. Guess that's fixed now, isn't it? /s

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

tscs37 9y ago

I've personally setup noreply accounts for some selfhosted services. These emails are truly noreply, there is no inbox, any incoming mail is blackholed. There is no sense in receiving it, it's automated and the software does not react to incoming mails. There is no reason to reply, there is no sense in replying, there is no way to reply, why demand the ability to reply? Why would I have me reading the garbage that piles up there? If you have a problem, contact postmaster/webmaster/root/etc. If I send you mail from a real human account, you can reply there. Simple as that. It seems a bit like someone demanding that the radio should respond to their choice of music. Sure, if you want that, get a music app (aka a meat-email) and stop listening to the radio (aka the machine-email)

sp332 9y ago
Why not send the email "From" postmaster/webmaster etc in the first place, or at least set the Reply-To header to that?
- tscs37 9y ago
  Because there is no reason for it. If you have a problem there is a contact email in every mail included. I do not feel like I should be sending mail from postmaster and the reply-to header does not feel any more appropriate. These emails are 100 percent automatic and do not require you to reply. Ever.
hinkley 9y ago
It would seem like over a long enough time horizon a significant fraction of the email you send is going to go to dead email addresses. Wouldn't it make sense once in a while to turn on receipt to see how bad your bounce rate is instead of ignoring it?
- tscs37 9y ago
  Not really. There is no reason for anyone to reply. As far as I'm aware from logs I only get about 10 Mails per month in these addresses. And I'm truly not interested in what someone has to say to an email that says "noreply"

jklein11 9y ago

This seems like a problem that could be solved by micropayments for sending and receiving emails. I've seen proposals[1] for a solution where the sender of an email pays a small fee to the recipient of the email. If you are sending as much email as you are receiving you wouldn't have to worry about using up your email. If you are sending a mass email, you will end up paying for it. In the case of no-replies, it would discourage the sender from sending an email that doesn't need to be replied to.

Walkman 9y ago

I always wondered why is this and I think it's just a habit and somebody do it because everybody else is doing it.

hinkley 9y ago
Fake it until you make it.

sparrish 9y ago

We decided against 'no-reply' emails when we started our business 6 years ago and it's been a great way to get our customers to engage with us. Every email we send out has a blurb like this: "Please let us know if you have any questions. You may reply to this email or reach us at support@..." Yes, we get some bounces and vacation/out of office auto-replies but the benefits far outweigh having to delete a few auto-replies that got through the filters.

tmnvix 9y ago
Are you dealing with 10s, 100s, or 1000s of customers?
- sparrish 9y ago
  1000s
Silhouette 9y ago
Yes, we get some bounces and vacation/out of office auto-replies but the benefits far outweigh having to delete a few auto-replies that got through the filters. This has been our experience as well, though maybe it's different for purely B2B communications. We're mostly B2C, and we've never found out-of-office replies to be a significant problem.

mv4 9y ago

I agree wholeheartedly. This practice is up there with "No Caller ID" calls.

vmarquet 9y ago

"Don’t make me hunt for a way to ask it." And this post makes me hunt google to find what "kthxbye" means...

honi 9y ago

Send as noreply@ with reply-to header pointing to a valid address.

jpalomaki 9y ago

This certainly also has to do with the value of the customer. If you are an insurance company the value of the customer may be measured in thousands of $$$. If you are a lean e-commerce middleman the value you extract from ordinary end-customer might be some cents. Engaging with the customer in email conversation may cost tens of dollars. While customers may love email, some (many?) customer service people actually don't. The trouble I have heard couple of times is that with email you usually never manage to solve the issue in one pass. Customer fires off email with insufficient details. Your service center checks the case, asks for more details. Customer does not respond immediately. When the reply comes, the person who originally handled the cases is not at work or has forgotten the details. You can call up the customer - if the customer has provided you the number, but that has it's own challenges. Customer can't talk right now, you need to call back at certain time etc. In some cases it simply does not work out financially to provide personalized customer service. Too many customers are so cheap that they prefer to deal with your competitor who automates things.