5 ms·
> It’s crazy for companies to discourage replies and force customers to find a different channel when the email itself has all relevant context. From what I've
by Sebb767 6y ago
> It’s crazy for companies to discourage replies and force customers to find a different channel when the email itself has all relevant context.
From what I've heard this is not about blocking customer input, but instead became standard due to the sheer amount of auto-reply traffic you're getting. If every one of those mails opens a ticket... Get two systems which send mail receipts in a loop for double the fun.
A second, minor reason might also be that you need to set up a mail ticketing system. That's no problem for a startup, but things might look different for a big company with established support teams of hundreds of people.
The situation might have changed by now, though, as the trend seems to reverse slowly. But as far as I know, these were the reasons on why donotreply@ became so common.
- seizethecheese 6y agoInteresting, we have had virtually no problem with auto-reply traffic. New collaborative email clients make it a lot easier to handle support without ticketing systems. We still are rather small, so it’s possible we will learn ourselves what all these companies already know, hah.
- paulsutter 6y agoWhich email client do you use or recommend for this?
- seizethecheese 6y agoWe use Front with a custom plugin. Fronts a bit buggy but very useful
- Sebb767 6y agoLet's hope the situation is better now ;) A factor might also be what kind of mails you send. If it's important stuff for a specific user it make sense to have a direct reply. If you set a reply address to a newsletter with millions of subscribers the situation probably looks a bit different, especially when said sign up happens without much user input (i.e. "click here to also receive our newsletter").
- paulsutter 6y agoWow, for the low effort of writing an OOO filter, you can stand out as a company that cares about customers? We use a staff member’s email address on our outbound mail, so that people don’t even need to hesitate before responding.
- seizethecheese 6y agoYeah my thought exactly. Also, going through the effort of filtering tickets also sounds worth it
- moksly 6y agoI think it depends a little on the context. I work in the public sector for instance, setting up a filter for our mail is something that, well, no one has successfully done yet. It’s not for lack of trying, we’ve had (and will continue to have) corporations with both big tech, startups and universities until we get something that’s actually better than outlook rules and a lot of manual sorting. The thing is, we cannot allow to let a single message land in the wrong inbox for more than 48hours. Obviously we don’t send “don’t reply e-mails” and we certainly never would from a domain that isn’t even ours, but filtering messages isn’t always easy. Hell, even with the inclusion of actual UUIDs for departments, and a national standard for sending secure business-to-business mail (post includes) that incorporates these standards, and throwing world leading AI science at it with Microsoft/Amazon/IBM behind it, we still employ two full time positions to handle the left overs and mistakes.
- ajuc 6y agoI've seen a big international bank internal network shut down because someone added a group mail of +- 10 000 people to a thread with jokes. Significant percent of these people were on holidays at the time so they responded automatically to each other with "out of office" messages and finally the network couldn't handle it. Emails are serious business ;)
- eru 6y ago> I've seen a big international bank internal network shut down because someone added a group mail of +- 10 000 people to a thread with jokes. Those stories are always entertaining. But honestly, those organisations only have themselves to blame. Filtering and stopping these internal chains shouldn't be any harder than basic spam filtering. Mostly easier, because your filter inputs are not as adversarial.
- HenryBemis 6y agoI believe it's to make it a bit more difficult to get the replies. If someone REALLY wants to reply, they can spend the extra 1-2 minutes to go to the company's website and either write to them via their Contact Form(s), or find their "info/sales/privacy/etc@company.com email, and FW the original+comment to that new address.
- AstralStorm 6y agoSure. Or they might quit using your services because they're not accessible. If they're really ticked off, give you bad reviews. Bonus that support mails are hidden behind ludicrous forms, terrible website design, images (to prevent spam) and so on.
- srtjstjsj 6y agoIf it wasn't about blocking customer input, the email would have a Reply link to a website, or an email address to reply to.