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No-reply emails from businesses shouldn’t be allowed
Why can a business send an actionable correspondence without a reply channel? What’s the sentiment around this line of thinking?
- caryd 6y agoYou try dealing with a million responses on every campaign and let us know how it worked out
- gus_massa 6y agoIf the person reviving the email has some benefit, then the business probably has some benefit and can pay someone to read the incoming email. If not, probably the million emails send in the campaign are just spam.
- TheCoelacanth 6y agoIf you can't handle that many responses, then maybe you just shouldn't be sending out so many emails. No reply emails are a tacit admission that the emails are low-value spam.
- joshuamorton 6y agoI disagree: I highly value the emails I receive from noreply@hnreplies.com. Same for email from various noreply addressed for google docs, or things like github's notification noreply. Marketing spam is one, but far from the only, use for noreply emails.
- social_quotient 6y agoI see subscription feed emails as you describe a bit different from a B2C/B2B email about an account or something specific to me that might require a dialog or reply should something need to be said.
- jpindar 6y agoA large part of my job is purchasing newly released products. I highly value marketing emails, that's why I subscribed to them.
- jpindar 6y agoI follow a number of repositories on Github, their notifications come from noreply.github.com. I also like knowing when there are new versions of various assets I've gotten from the Unity asset store, these notifications come from no-reply@unity3d.com. I am subscribed to the headlines from my local newspapers, one of them is delivered from noreply@patch.com. My utility company sends payment confirmation emails from noreply@unitil.com. I like knowing about the occasional blog post from authors I follow on Goodreads, these come from no-reply@mail.goodreads.com I like knowing when games on my Steam wishlist go on sale, these notifications come from noreply@steampowered.com I could go on...
- twirlock 6y agoThat's kind of the point. Feel free to not spam me.
- acdha 6y agoIf you’re sending millions of messages, you can include links for the most common actions (e.g. real, working unsubscribes). If you can’t afford to pay people to deal with the remaining replies, you should be better at targeting people who actually want your messages.
- thatha7777 6y agoYes, this. I’m sick of finding contact forms to respond to incorrectly issued invoices.
- x0x0 6y agoJust don't pay them. They'll reach out.
- TristanBall 6y agoHa.. or they'll send multiple invoices from no-reply, then pass you off to debt collection and/or lawyers. I'd draw a distinction between this kind of email - where a company is at least trying to require you to do something, and which may have ongoing personal or legal or personal ramifications ( e.g., credit score ), and just about any other commercial email, whether it's a "campaign", or automated function alerts or whatever. Sending invoices from no-reply, with a vague "see our website for contact details" is such terrible customer service that it borders on bullying. If a business can't deal with all the auto-responders, then the method of response should include enough context that the first person a reach knows what's going on, and is most likely the right person to deal with the response. So, for example a link to a contact form that's prefilled with context information ( like an invoice number, or a ticket number that was auto-created when the invoice was ), and that routes directly to the correct people, eg ccounts, not sales or tech support!
- sukilot 6y agoFortunately, in US you can challenge those fraudulent debt collection attempts and they will be cancelled by default if no human fixes them, or else the collector pays fines to you.
- social_quotient 6y agoHa - this is exactly what caused me to post the original submission. A wrongly generated invoice from ADT Security.
- runjake 6y agos/allowed/tolerated/ I don't think this requires regulation, which is what the word "allowed" implies.
- social_quotient 6y agoIt was more from a perspective of return address. If you mail me something I can expect to mail you back at the return address. Imagine the return address on mail being “mail sent to this address will be sent back to you without being read”. Seems weird. I hadn’t thought of regulation but more of it being a poor CX pattern that businesses shouldn’t do. It seems impolite and I was curious how others saw it. Thx!
- afarrell 6y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publish%E2%80%93subscribe_pattern https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publish%E2%80%93subscribe_patt...
- codingdave 6y agoFor us, it is because we do want to hear from you, and getting lost in an email shuffle isn't helpful to either one of us. So we send from a no-reply, but include info on all the various ways we do have to get in touch with us. Directly with us, so we can talk immediately and resolve concerns, not have you send emails into a black hole.
- jhardy54 6y agoWhy not just send emails from an address that's monitored instead?
- davidbanham 6y agoBecause then all the robots (vacation responders) reply too. The separate address in the body of the email is a little like a captcha humanity test.
- anoncake 6y agoEasy solution: Mandate that auto responses are marked as such in a header.
- sebastien_b 6y agoObvious problem: the same impossibility if enforcing this applies to this solution as well.
- anoncake 6y agoNeither is impossible to enforce.
- sebastien_b 6y agoPlease do explain how.
- toast0 6y agoToo many out of office style autoresponders reply to everything, even mail properly marked to not generate autoresponders / marking mail so it doesn't trigger causes it to get flagged as spam.
- JaggedJax 6y agoWhile this can be very annoying, I have two thoughts on this. First, I'd say there is no practical way to "require" this. Some companies are just going to suck here and we should avoid them when possible. Second, lots of the comments focus on never allowing "no reply" addresses, but in my experience we're monitoring and sending out automated alerts and notifications to our customers. We include a link for more info/actions and a clear email address for contacting support. Before we switched to sending from a no-reply address we were bombarded with out of office emails (this is a B2B platform). As a small team it was significantly slowing down our ability to reply to real support issues quickly. If there was a better OOO system widely used that didn't send an email to my support I would gladly switch back.
- tinus_hn 6y agoSurprise! If you’re a government it’s pretty easy to require this. You just require it and it’s required.
- JaggedJax 6y agoSo true. Let's hope we don't have to go that far with every country imposing their rule on every person in the world. We have too much of that already.
- geofft 6y agoYou have to be a dictatorship, though, because it's pretty hard to imagine any representative government wanting this. And it's pretty hard to be a dictatorship and remain in power, actually. More so if you give businesses a financial reason and not just a moral one to leave.
- masukomi 6y agoYou mean in the same way that spam email and spam calls to mobile numbers where it might actually cost folks money to answer are illegal in the US? Yeah, those requirements are so effective.
- acdha 6y ago
- gitgud 6y agoWhat would be an example reply to an automated email notification? It would be like replying to a push notification on your phone...
- social_quotient 6y agoIMO it’s more like a phone call where it rings, I answer and they can’t hear what I say back to the caller. They just play a user specific recording and then hang up. In a context like this it feels like a two-way communication medium being abused for 1 way.
- schwartzworld 6y agoCounterpoint: regardless of what address is used, nobody can force a business to actually check and respond to emails. A no-reply address is at least a transparent statement that your response will go unaddressed.
- oliwarner 6y agoIsn't that the point of this post? Force companies sending email commercially commercial to process a reply.
- acdha 6y agoBusinesses need regulation to address externalities like this. Email is cheaper than almost any other form of messaging but unethical businesses will still try to cut corners if they’re allowed to. Validating emails is a similar example: it’s trivial to do but marketing weasels think it cuts into their stats and try not to do it. This is how I end up with major companies sending me information like their customers’ names, phone numbers, home addresses, and license plates because protecting their customers’ privacy just isn’t going to happen without significant legal penalties.
- arrty88 6y agoTwitter is the defacto location to contact most businesses these days when you can’t get a hold of someone easily.
- hactually 6y agowoah, hard pass!
- villgax 6y agoIt's mostly for automated alerts/notices so that you do in fact ping back with the correct ticket/issue which is traceable in whatever CRM they use.