5 ms·

Related: I don't understand why companies use a "noreply@..." email address. Why not make it easy for a customer to give you feedback?

dustingetz 15y ago
a better question: Why don't companies want customer feedback via email? Once you figure out the right question, you can probably figure the answer out on your own.
- Ecio78 15y ago
  My employer is not a startup (financial bank) but we use a technical "noreply" account for sending automated mail to our users (no external services, they're sent through our mailserver). We use a noreply because the same account is used for different kind of notifications (to clients, to financial advisors, to internal users, to external parties etc..) and we have different inbound mail accounts for assisting them (and actually the main channels for communicating with are web trouble ticketing and toll free number, mail is not the suggested one). Having said that, I must admit that the whole system is quite basic and not integrated as you'd expect for serious problem tracking (ideally we should use something that can keep track a problem through different channels, integrating web, mail and phone ticketing). N.B. one problem is that unfortunately there are tons of people who cant read and dont understand that if you write from a "noreply@domain" account and write in the mail "THIS IS A SERVICE ACCOUNT PLEASE DO NOT REPLY TO THIS MAIL", you're actually supposed not to do it
  - flurp 15y ago
    This might be your point (didn't quite get your point) but that's exactly why you should fix this. You actually have separate inbound and outbound channels. It's rediciously simple to change those outbound channels' email addresses so that a direct reply will be sent to the corresponding inbound channel. It doesn't matter if the system is basic and uses a smtp server or if it uses a hot new email routing service. It's about setting the correct from address in your systems code.
    - Ecio78 15y ago
      The automated outbound mails are mail like "you have a new trouble ticket, please login to your personal area" (maybe because they forgot to send us some documents) They dont have to reply to the mail, they have to login and reply via the troubleticketing system, eventually uploading attachments. if you set the from address as you suggest, but you dont have a fully integrated (mail/web etc..) ticketing system, you end up with a mess (part on the web part on the mail account).
Aloisius 15y ago
Agreed. From a similar comment on HN a few months ago we changed our email address to concierge@ (we're a restaurant reservations startup). Very few people reply (automated emails still look automated), so it is very easy to manage.
shalakhin 15y ago
I think there is too much automation in business-customer interaction in email sphere. Sad but true.
smsm42 15y ago
Because of automated bounces. The problem is that a) many mailservers would send their bounce messages to that address and b) there's no standard bounce message format, so there's no easy automatic way to distinguish bounces from non-bounces. There are solutions that do that, but they are basically a bag of heuristics, and usually everybody builds their own. So you either have to build/buy complicated software to filter responses, or your response address is flooded with bounces till its effectively unmanageable. The path of the least resistance is to put noreply@ there and have humans contact different address.
- RossM 15y ago
  I wonder if automated systems generally send to the sender email address, even when a reply-to is included. Interesting to know a/the reasoning though.
  - smsm42 15y ago
    Some of them do, some of them don't. Email is a very old system, and for some things there's no standards, for some things implementations predate standards so one has to live with what is out there. Some of them just broken and since there's often no standard to point them to they just say "well, we know there's industry practice to do X, but we prefer to do Y".
    - MBCook 15y ago
      This is the problem. I've helped build my company's bounce tracker. There is an RFC that explains how you are supposed to do things, but at least 50% of email servers don't follow it. You may get your whole email back, or just the start. The message may tell you what went wrong, it may not. It may tell you what email address you tried to send to that failed, that may be missing (some mail servers actually redact it).
      - zrail 15y ago
        The worst one is when they successfully deliver their bounce to the Return-Path but then corrupt the To on the bounce to be the To on the original message and then copy their Message-ID into the original message, thus removing any chance of successfully processing anything. I never figured out the actual MTA that was doing this, but Lotus Domino was involved. shakes fist
alexpak 15y ago
My guess is, if you use your main email and it is marked as spam, then you wouldn't be able to send regular messages from that address.
- dennisgorelik 15y ago
  Not really. If email is marked as spam, then IP address that sent that email is punished the most, not the email address itself.
shazow 15y ago
Counter-example: When email notifications contain private information, such as an alert of an engagement or communication between two users, there's no benefit from a reply-able email in this case. In fact, reply-for-feedback is bad since it will include private information quoted within. Though in general, I agree that noreply is needlessly overused.
- kijin 15y ago
  If privacy in replies and forwards is such a huge concern, shouldn't someone write an RFC for a header that indicates "Don't include original in replies and forwards"? Even if only a few companies (Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Apple, Mozilla) implemented it initially, that would protect a lot of people.
  - saurik 15y ago
    This does not help, as while the private information sent to the user is missing, the private information sent from the user will still be there: they will simply now send complaints to the people who provide their email client that it didn't work. You have to remember that websites are used by "normal people": the same people who get punished by websites with ludicrous URLs or broken images and fall for schemes asking them for their money or password. I recently took over a website that uses OSQA (an open-source stack overflow implementation). When users get answers or comments, they get an email from "JailbreakQA" <admin@jailbreakqa.com>. These emails now go to me, and the people who respond to the emails invariably are trying to talk to the other user, not to me. In this case the conversations were already public, so it isn't a big deal, but the exact same thing would happen if a user got a comment from a friend on Facebook. To be clear: these emails clearly state they are a notification, that they came from the website you are using, that to view the content you need to return to the website (providing a URL), and then separating the content from the other user in the body. People still just reply. Now, maybe you think that should work: that the emails should go back to the website and to the conversation thread, but the reality is that bridging email will make that a horrible experience, as the way people speak in email, the formatting available, and the crazy intermix of MIME and the original content, causes chaos: imagine trying to safely and automatically convert an email back into a Facebook Wall reply ;P. The reality is: these are notifications, not messages. Replying to them is nonsensical, and if we were going to extend the email protocol at all, it should be to make "this is not really an email" an explicit first class feature. (As an aside: the count recovery emails sent by Cydia, my primary work, can be replied to. Almost all of the email I get in reply is an elaborate and sometimes quite time consuming version of "thanks, that worked!"... I am simply floored that people thank the automated system, but hey: at least they seen happy. ;P)
reinhardt 15y ago
At a previous company we changed "noreply@..." to "doreply@..." exactly for making feedback easier.
_pdeschen 15y ago
I had a short blog post on the subject [1] a while back which got up to the HN front page. I think content is still relevant if you care to read. [1]: http://blog.rassemblr.com/2011/01/user-registration-follow-up-email-a-check-list http://blog.rassemblr.com/2011/01/user-registration-follow-u...
jeffclark 15y ago
It's not because of automated bounces. It's not because of spam issues. It's not even because of laziness. The startups that do this probably do it it because they get a ton of spam back. I've lead a couple of projects now that have a few thousand users each. Nothing huge, all consumer-focused. I always make my notification emails be from jeff@{project}.com to give it that "human touch". And I get the most ridiculous replies ever. Not only do I get bounces (not a big deal) and vacation auto-responders (also not a big deal), but I also get messages from people that know they're getting someone's real email address. People that want to talk. People that add you to their Google Talk or their "Fwd: FWD: FWD:" emails. People with insecure Hotmail passwords who start spamming you when their account gets hacked. Obviously, some of the emails are very helpful - bug reports, feature requests, unsubscribes, etc... But some (I'm going to say most) are essentially just spam in the other direction. I've moved my notification emails to be from "amy@{project}.com", a Mailgun inbox, and process it accordingly (e.g.: bounces get and unsub'd). It has a human name, but a mechanical backend. I strongly suggest it.
- click170 15y ago
  As long as that inbox is still checked manually for real feedback, that sounds like an amicable solution.
ivankirigin 15y ago
i noticed the other day that linkedin puts hit-reply@ when someone sends me "inmail". Subtle user education and imperative voice both

dustingetz 15y ago

a better question: Why don't companies want customer feedback via email? Once you figure out the right question, you can probably figure the answer out on your own.

Ecio78 15y ago
My employer is not a startup (financial bank) but we use a technical "noreply" account for sending automated mail to our users (no external services, they're sent through our mailserver). We use a noreply because the same account is used for different kind of notifications (to clients, to financial advisors, to internal users, to external parties etc..) and we have different inbound mail accounts for assisting them (and actually the main channels for communicating with are web trouble ticketing and toll free number, mail is not the suggested one). Having said that, I must admit that the whole system is quite basic and not integrated as you'd expect for serious problem tracking (ideally we should use something that can keep track a problem through different channels, integrating web, mail and phone ticketing). N.B. one problem is that unfortunately there are tons of people who cant read and dont understand that if you write from a "noreply@domain" account and write in the mail "THIS IS A SERVICE ACCOUNT PLEASE DO NOT REPLY TO THIS MAIL", you're actually supposed not to do it
- flurp 15y ago
  This might be your point (didn't quite get your point) but that's exactly why you should fix this. You actually have separate inbound and outbound channels. It's rediciously simple to change those outbound channels' email addresses so that a direct reply will be sent to the corresponding inbound channel. It doesn't matter if the system is basic and uses a smtp server or if it uses a hot new email routing service. It's about setting the correct from address in your systems code.
  - Ecio78 15y ago
    The automated outbound mails are mail like "you have a new trouble ticket, please login to your personal area" (maybe because they forgot to send us some documents) They dont have to reply to the mail, they have to login and reply via the troubleticketing system, eventually uploading attachments. if you set the from address as you suggest, but you dont have a fully integrated (mail/web etc..) ticketing system, you end up with a mess (part on the web part on the mail account).

Aloisius 15y ago

Agreed. From a similar comment on HN a few months ago we changed our email address to concierge@ (we're a restaurant reservations startup). Very few people reply (automated emails still look automated), so it is very easy to manage.

shalakhin 15y ago

I think there is too much automation in business-customer interaction in email sphere. Sad but true.

smsm42 15y ago

Because of automated bounces. The problem is that a) many mailservers would send their bounce messages to that address and b) there's no standard bounce message format, so there's no easy automatic way to distinguish bounces from non-bounces. There are solutions that do that, but they are basically a bag of heuristics, and usually everybody builds their own. So you either have to build/buy complicated software to filter responses, or your response address is flooded with bounces till its effectively unmanageable. The path of the least resistance is to put noreply@ there and have humans contact different address.

RossM 15y ago
I wonder if automated systems generally send to the sender email address, even when a reply-to is included. Interesting to know a/the reasoning though.
- smsm42 15y ago
  Some of them do, some of them don't. Email is a very old system, and for some things there's no standards, for some things implementations predate standards so one has to live with what is out there. Some of them just broken and since there's often no standard to point them to they just say "well, we know there's industry practice to do X, but we prefer to do Y".
  - MBCook 15y ago
    This is the problem. I've helped build my company's bounce tracker. There is an RFC that explains how you are supposed to do things, but at least 50% of email servers don't follow it. You may get your whole email back, or just the start. The message may tell you what went wrong, it may not. It may tell you what email address you tried to send to that failed, that may be missing (some mail servers actually redact it).
    - zrail 15y ago
      The worst one is when they successfully deliver their bounce to the Return-Path but then corrupt the To on the bounce to be the To on the original message and then copy their Message-ID into the original message, thus removing any chance of successfully processing anything. I never figured out the actual MTA that was doing this, but Lotus Domino was involved. shakes fist

alexpak 15y ago

My guess is, if you use your main email and it is marked as spam, then you wouldn't be able to send regular messages from that address.

dennisgorelik 15y ago
Not really. If email is marked as spam, then IP address that sent that email is punished the most, not the email address itself.

shazow 15y ago

Counter-example: When email notifications contain private information, such as an alert of an engagement or communication between two users, there's no benefit from a reply-able email in this case. In fact, reply-for-feedback is bad since it will include private information quoted within. Though in general, I agree that noreply is needlessly overused.

kijin 15y ago
If privacy in replies and forwards is such a huge concern, shouldn't someone write an RFC for a header that indicates "Don't include original in replies and forwards"? Even if only a few companies (Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Apple, Mozilla) implemented it initially, that would protect a lot of people.
- saurik 15y ago
  This does not help, as while the private information sent to the user is missing, the private information sent from the user will still be there: they will simply now send complaints to the people who provide their email client that it didn't work. You have to remember that websites are used by "normal people": the same people who get punished by websites with ludicrous URLs or broken images and fall for schemes asking them for their money or password. I recently took over a website that uses OSQA (an open-source stack overflow implementation). When users get answers or comments, they get an email from "JailbreakQA" <admin@jailbreakqa.com>. These emails now go to me, and the people who respond to the emails invariably are trying to talk to the other user, not to me. In this case the conversations were already public, so it isn't a big deal, but the exact same thing would happen if a user got a comment from a friend on Facebook. To be clear: these emails clearly state they are a notification, that they came from the website you are using, that to view the content you need to return to the website (providing a URL), and then separating the content from the other user in the body. People still just reply. Now, maybe you think that should work: that the emails should go back to the website and to the conversation thread, but the reality is that bridging email will make that a horrible experience, as the way people speak in email, the formatting available, and the crazy intermix of MIME and the original content, causes chaos: imagine trying to safely and automatically convert an email back into a Facebook Wall reply ;P. The reality is: these are notifications, not messages. Replying to them is nonsensical, and if we were going to extend the email protocol at all, it should be to make "this is not really an email" an explicit first class feature. (As an aside: the count recovery emails sent by Cydia, my primary work, can be replied to. Almost all of the email I get in reply is an elaborate and sometimes quite time consuming version of "thanks, that worked!"... I am simply floored that people thank the automated system, but hey: at least they seen happy. ;P)

reinhardt 15y ago

At a previous company we changed "noreply@..." to "doreply@..." exactly for making feedback easier.

_pdeschen 15y ago

I had a short blog post on the subject [1] a while back which got up to the HN front page. I think content is still relevant if you care to read. [1]: http://blog.rassemblr.com/2011/01/user-registration-follow-up-email-a-check-list http://blog.rassemblr.com/2011/01/user-registration-follow-u...

jeffclark 15y ago

It's not because of automated bounces. It's not because of spam issues. It's not even because of laziness. The startups that do this probably do it it because they get a ton of spam back. I've lead a couple of projects now that have a few thousand users each. Nothing huge, all consumer-focused. I always make my notification emails be from jeff@{project}.com to give it that "human touch". And I get the most ridiculous replies ever. Not only do I get bounces (not a big deal) and vacation auto-responders (also not a big deal), but I also get messages from people that know they're getting someone's real email address. People that want to talk. People that add you to their Google Talk or their "Fwd: FWD: FWD:" emails. People with insecure Hotmail passwords who start spamming you when their account gets hacked. Obviously, some of the emails are very helpful - bug reports, feature requests, unsubscribes, etc... But some (I'm going to say most) are essentially just spam in the other direction. I've moved my notification emails to be from "amy@{project}.com", a Mailgun inbox, and process it accordingly (e.g.: bounces get and unsub'd). It has a human name, but a mechanical backend. I strongly suggest it.

click170 15y ago
As long as that inbox is still checked manually for real feedback, that sounds like an amicable solution.

ivankirigin 15y ago

i noticed the other day that linkedin puts hit-reply@ when someone sends me "inmail". Subtle user education and imperative voice both