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The no-reply email is like sending your error logs to /dev/null THAT BEING SAID I used to be responsible for 600 active websites, and when we switched to usin
by ethank 15y ago
The no-reply email is like sending your error logs to /dev/null
THAT BEING SAID
I used to be responsible for 600 active websites, and when we switched to using a help-desk system for auto-sent emails we broke things and had to go back to no-reply.
Lesson learned for us: it's worse to give the appearance of attention if you don't have the means to deliver on that promise.
- josscrowcroft 15y ago>> it's worse to give the appearance of attention if you don't have the means to deliver on that promise. Good call actually. In which case I think better to go with something like what Wufoo does, I believe theirs is something like "friendlyrobot" and if you reply to it, it sends you a friendly message explaining that nobody checks that mailbox, but there is a support desk they can contact. FTW.
- glhaynes 15y agoWould be better if they didn't go to that trouble and just forwarded it on.
- blasdel 15y agoIt's acting as a captcha — otherwise they'd have to deal with a shitton of automated replies and bounces from the customers and their crappy mailservers
- glhaynes 15y agoHate to subject customers to a captcha when they need support!
- Cushman 15y agoSurely it's the job description of customer service to deal with hassles in order to make users' lives easier?
- MicahWedemeyer 15y agoOften times customer service == the development team == the marketing team == the executives == you When you're a small shop, dealing with this kind of stuff day in, day out can get very taxing.
- eftpotrm 15y agoOK, so set up a filtration system. If you're good enough to build a system capable of running at that level you should be able to set up some basic mail filters or even a more complex bayesian filter to knock out at least bounces and probably a good percentage of autoreplies too. Removing noise from a system isn't a job where it's perfect or useless; a substantial reduction is often quite good enough.
- politician 15y agoI don't see why it's necessary to make this complicated: "friendlyrobot" is the filtration system. As you said, it doesn't need to be perfect to be useful.
- twakefield 15y agoBounces and auto-responders can be parsed and separated from human responses.
- pbreit 15y agoWhat was the problem? Junk? Autoresponders? Somthing else? Junk is easy to weed out if you run it through Gmail. Autoresponders can be managed for the most part with filtering (although there's room for dedicated tools here).
- ethank 15y agoWe were a six person department managing 600 websites, for musicians. The worst were for sites that catered to older clienteles. The issue was staffing mostly. Unsolicited demo issues secondly and "faster horse" syndrome thirdly.
- pavel_lishin 15y agoSo what's the difference between using noreply, and using somnething like replybot and ... just ignoring those e-mails 99% of the time?
- ethank 15y agoThe implication of what the change in the "from" affordance meant to the user. When we switched from "no-reply" to an actual address (help@artistdomain.com), and we couldn't respond, people got angry.
- josscrowcroft 15y agoWhat is 'faster horse' syndrome, out of interest? Never heard that but it sounds good.
- ethank 15y agoGiven the ability to suggest things, users will always demand a faster horse, more sleep, more sex and to lose weight. Basically its saying, don't solicit opinions because it all normalizes to "I want things to be better"