7 ms·

Stop Using noreply

85 points by rrhoover 14y ago

Skalman 14y ago
The post talks about sending personal emails. While that may be possible for smaller companies it doesn't really scale. At some point a company will have to use more automated email. However, I think that you should really consider whether email is an acceptable means of supporting customers/users. If it is, why not have Reply-To: support@example.com? It has happened on several occasions that I have questions regarding an incoming email, but it's sent from noreply (with no Reply-To) so I can't respond directly. Instead I have to look for an email address or a form on their website, requiring a long detour.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
peterjmag 14y ago
My initial response was, "What about companies that send email to hundreds of thousands of recipients? Surely they can't always handle such a flood of direct replies." But if you don't have the resources to handle so many replies, then you probably shouldn't be sending email blasts to that many people in the first place.
greenyoda 14y ago
"I replied and we shared a short conversation where I learned the meaning behind the name Quibb. Fun. :) And she does this for all new users. Bravo, Sandi! As Sandi has demonstrated, the Internet doesn’t have to be faceless. We need to stop communicating with robots." This idea doesn't scale very well. If you're a struggling little company that's trying to hold on to a handful of users (Quibb is currently "invite-only" [1]), it might be feasible. But a company that already has enough users to be successful can't afford to hire all the people it would take to personally interact with every user. Imagine how many people Facebook would need to hire to personally thank every new user for opening a Facebook account (in the hundreds of languages that Facebook users around the world speak). [1] http://quibb.com/about http://quibb.com/about
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- nhangen 14y ago
  I don't agree. I've personally emailed every single one of our IgnitionDeck customers, about 20% of which reply. It takes maybe 2-3 minutes extra per reply. Initially, I used TextExpander, and later, Intercom. These are paid customers though, so were I offering a free service I probably wouldn't have done so.
  - wolfhumble 14y ago
    Care to share what software Intercom is? Don't seem to find it on typical Mac download sites or in the app store . . .
    - brandnewlow 14y ago
      http://intercom.io http://intercom.io It's great.
      - nhangen 14y ago
        It really is. I think their pricing structure is a little off, but it's a service I gladly pay for and recommend. I met the guys at LessConf last year, and they're great people, so it's a win-win in my book.
- frankdenbow 14y ago
  True, lots of ideas dont seem to scale. It is still worth trying, though, especially if you are well before the situation that would make this approach break. I write personalized thank you notes in my subscription service and it is one of the favorite parts for my subscribers.
- connortomas 14y ago
  I think it's possible to scale a personal approach to support. Maybe, as Quibb grows, Sandi doesn't actually manually send each message. Maybe she sets up an autoresponder with a default welcome message. However, it's still possible to send automated messages in a personal way. Instead of the email coming from noreply@quibb.com, or even support@quibb.com (better), maybe Sandi continues to have the welcome emails sent from her personal company email. Maybe she continues to use a tone in that default message that suggests approachability. As you scale, there are always tricks you can use to make customers firmly believe you care. Also worth considering: sure, Facebook don't personally interact with every new user, but you can be damn sure that they take a more personal approach when dealing with advertisers.
sudonim 14y ago
I love that Sandi does this. However, it doesn't scale. I signed up on the 18th when her blog post about it hit HN. I didn't get a personal email from her but I had the expectation to after reading the post. :/ I'm trying to figure out how to make this type of thing scale beyond your first 100 customers, and I've come up with a few thoughts. 1. Don't create that expectation of a personal connection. This is the most common thing you see at large companies. I don't think this is a good way to do it. 2. Hire someone as the face of the company -- the community manager probably, and send a mix of automated and personal mail from them. But make them the face of the company. This is something I'm responsible for now. And it still has limits. 3. Randomly assign a contact person within the company for every signup. And automate the insertion of their signature in every email. This however has issues with turnover, and the voice of the emails. So far, I think what works best is automated (but specific) emails from me, the CEO. And then introductions to the rest of the team for problem resolution. I'd love to hear what others think works best.
- rmaccloy 14y ago
  Even if the reply-to just dumps responses into a customer support queue, that's better than 90% of mass mail is doing. Separately, I think it's great if you can have all of your employees involved in the support and outreach process, but that's a cultural thing and thus a bit harder than changing a mail header.
  - sudonim 14y ago
    Yes, I think all employees involved is a huge win. In our company of 3, we do that. But one thing that's problematic from the customer's point of view, is: "Who should I contact to solve my problem?" The ideal experience in my opinion is a single contact point, with the authority and knowledge to solve every issue you have. That's of course unrealistic, but I want to find a way to approximate that. The closest thing I've heard is Alla Klein: http://code.dblock.org/alla-klein-a-fake-person-in-charge-of-customer-support http://code.dblock.org/alla-klein-a-fake-person-in-charge-of...
  - eli 14y ago
    My startup never uses no-reply and someone reads pretty much every reply. But note that this is not zero cost. The time your support staff spends deleting out of office replies and spam is time they aren't helping real people.
solox3 14y ago
Well, yes. If your email is sent such that you welcome replies, you don't use noreply@example.com.
kosei 14y ago
I think this message is geared toward startups. But it's not explicit. It's a good point for startups to try to increase the understanding of their customers. But obviously is not relevant for companies with much larger reach.
dantiberian 14y ago
This is useful in some situations but a large amount of transactional email doesn't and shouldn't have replies made to it. As with almost all advice that you find in blog posts, it works in one situation but is presented as an answer to every situation. Instead of arguing in the comments about whether or not this would work for your company for every email, try and suggest places where this would be useful.
nhangen 14y ago
I agree. It doesn't require anything extra to use an email address that accepts replies. Even if they go into a dark hole and are never read, at least you aren't sending a message that you don't care what the receiver thinks. When I receive a no reply, I assume that the company doesn't care about my opinion as it relates to their communication, and in that case, I share the sentiment. It leaves a bad taste in my mouth. The exception, I suppose, would be something like an Amazon email notifying me of related products.
mattangriffel 14y ago
It seems to me that well thought out email marketing should take responses into account as part of the funnel. That being said, I haven't seen any good examples besides just forwarding responses to a customer service queue, as rmaccloy mentions. The point of email marketing is that it scales, and you can do testing. One on one communication is almost the opposite. Companies shouldn't have to choose between one or the other.
_delirium 14y ago
I vaguely agree; when I see that wordy explanation about "this is sent from a blah blah replies won't be blah blah" I tend to read it uncharitably, even though I know why they do it. My first read of it, somewhat involuntarily, is along the lines of: wow, these people can't even deal with the use-case of someone replying to this email, and are so befuddled by the possibility that the best workaround they could think of was to tack on this wordy disclaimer in the email, begging people not to hit "reply".
sandimac 14y ago
It's definitely not easy to do at scale, if possible at all. I'm still in the early stages with the product, so at this point (and with this particular type of product) the personal, un-scalable approach makes sense. The style of email that I sent to Ryan, and the one that I describe in the post that he links to, is only for people that are arriving through 'warm' connections (e.g. a colleague told them about the site), versus arriving through twitter, search, etc. For completely cold connections, I use a slightly less personal approach. I shared a post about that here last week, and there were some great comments - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4527094 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4527094. That method still requires some effort from a real person, but doesn't include any actual 'research'.
notatoad 14y ago
This makes the rounds of the blogs every couple weeks, and yeah... If you use noreply@, you're going to negatively impact user engagement. But in reality, sometimes you just don't have time to talk to users. At least, not all of them. I have time to provide good service to a limited number of my customers every day. Meaningless feel-good interactions reduce the number of meaningful interactions I can have. I check the no-reply inbox every couple days anyways, and in general the people who send email to that address instead of seeking out the support email on my homepage are the customers I'd rather lose. It's a good filter.
- alttag 14y ago
  I once spent some time chatting with a guy who ran a handful of fire-and-forget IT side-businesses, including wifi/hotspot internet access. His customer service philosophy was very simple: either you use and like the service, or he refunds the money. It wasn't altruism, it was self-interest. He didn't have time to do customer support, and was very blunt about it. Either customers corrected their own issues, or they were no longer customers. This was one of the ways he was able to have time for his several companies.
nagrom 14y ago
On a similar topic from a recent experience...I recently got into a conversation with KLM about delayed luggage. You fill in a web form that emails them with your complaint. They reply to your email address. If you reply to their email, you get an automated email back saying that they didn't receive your response and that all information must be communicated via a web form. So now you must go into your sent box, copy the email and then go to the link on the klm.com website. You find your reference number, put it in and then paste the text of your email into the text box...and hopefully get a reply. (It's been 3 days.) It really amazes me that companies are so bad at communication.
Roelven 14y ago
I don't agree with this. Having worked on the product side of several larger scale email infrastructures, it's impossible to scale this correctly. Yes, we all want to talk less with robots and appreciate getting a reply from a human, but if you're a web company looking to grow your product to be used by millions, you can't get this to work while keeping your co-workers happy (when I discussed something similar with our community support team they looked at me like they wanted to kill me). There might be a way to scale it by filtering messages and sending certain replies on certain topics, but then again, your support team will ask you where the reply address will redirect to. Who will manage that inbox? Who needs to reply those emails? Do you want to increase the load on your support guys even more?
IsTom 14y ago
I think this is a bad idea for the user in the long run, perhaps not only for the user. Think about how long does it take you now to recoginze and (not) read noreply@ e-mails? How long will this take when they are actually directed to you? There's enough distractions on the internet already and if more companies start doing this it will probably result in another arms race.
webjunkie 14y ago
I don't think noreply is about not wanting people to respond to your messages. It is rather a solution for all the garbage you get back when sending out email to thousands of people. You will get many many mailer deamon mails for people who typed their addresses wrong or whose mailbox is full (yes, there are still webhosts that have a 20 MB limit apparently). Filtering all this stuff takes lots of effort and seems like a bad thing to spent time on when you can just use noreply and include a "Have questions? Email us at service@example.com" line.
- andyjpb 14y ago
  This is why Reply-To, Errors-To, From, MAIL-From, Sender, etc. are all separate headers.
- jewel 14y ago
  Bounces should go to the "envelope from address", which is different than the from address in the actual email. The way I've set this up before had the envelope from address be "bounce-$user_id@companydomain.com" so that we could identify bad addresses, but any replies from humans go to someone directly. You can also use the Reply-To header to achieve the same result.
  - riobard 14y ago
    Yes, in theory. Unless you run into a not-so-compliant mail daemon…

85 points by rrhoover 14y ago

The post talks about sending personal emails. While that may be possible for smaller companies it doesn't really scale. At some point a company will have to use more automated email. However, I think that you should really consider whether email is an acceptable means of supporting customers/users. If it is, why not have Reply-To: support@example.com? It has happened on several occasions that I have questions regarding an incoming email, but it's sent from noreply (with no Reply-To) so I can't respond directly. Instead I have to look for an email address or a form on their website, requiring a long detour.

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]

peterjmag 14y ago

My initial response was, "What about companies that send email to hundreds of thousands of recipients? Surely they can't always handle such a flood of direct replies." But if you don't have the resources to handle so many replies, then you probably shouldn't be sending email blasts to that many people in the first place.

greenyoda 14y ago

"I replied and we shared a short conversation where I learned the meaning behind the name Quibb. Fun. :) And she does this for all new users. Bravo, Sandi! As Sandi has demonstrated, the Internet doesn’t have to be faceless. We need to stop communicating with robots." This idea doesn't scale very well. If you're a struggling little company that's trying to hold on to a handful of users (Quibb is currently "invite-only" [1]), it might be feasible. But a company that already has enough users to be successful can't afford to hire all the people it would take to personally interact with every user. Imagine how many people Facebook would need to hire to personally thank every new user for opening a Facebook account (in the hundreds of languages that Facebook users around the world speak). [1] http://quibb.com/about http://quibb.com/about

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
nhangen 14y ago
I don't agree. I've personally emailed every single one of our IgnitionDeck customers, about 20% of which reply. It takes maybe 2-3 minutes extra per reply. Initially, I used TextExpander, and later, Intercom. These are paid customers though, so were I offering a free service I probably wouldn't have done so.
- wolfhumble 14y ago
  Care to share what software Intercom is? Don't seem to find it on typical Mac download sites or in the app store . . .
  - brandnewlow 14y ago
    http://intercom.io http://intercom.io It's great.
    - nhangen 14y ago
      It really is. I think their pricing structure is a little off, but it's a service I gladly pay for and recommend. I met the guys at LessConf last year, and they're great people, so it's a win-win in my book.
frankdenbow 14y ago
True, lots of ideas dont seem to scale. It is still worth trying, though, especially if you are well before the situation that would make this approach break. I write personalized thank you notes in my subscription service and it is one of the favorite parts for my subscribers.
connortomas 14y ago
I think it's possible to scale a personal approach to support. Maybe, as Quibb grows, Sandi doesn't actually manually send each message. Maybe she sets up an autoresponder with a default welcome message. However, it's still possible to send automated messages in a personal way. Instead of the email coming from noreply@quibb.com, or even support@quibb.com (better), maybe Sandi continues to have the welcome emails sent from her personal company email. Maybe she continues to use a tone in that default message that suggests approachability. As you scale, there are always tricks you can use to make customers firmly believe you care. Also worth considering: sure, Facebook don't personally interact with every new user, but you can be damn sure that they take a more personal approach when dealing with advertisers.

sudonim 14y ago

I love that Sandi does this. However, it doesn't scale. I signed up on the 18th when her blog post about it hit HN. I didn't get a personal email from her but I had the expectation to after reading the post. :/ I'm trying to figure out how to make this type of thing scale beyond your first 100 customers, and I've come up with a few thoughts. 1. Don't create that expectation of a personal connection. This is the most common thing you see at large companies. I don't think this is a good way to do it. 2. Hire someone as the face of the company -- the community manager probably, and send a mix of automated and personal mail from them. But make them the face of the company. This is something I'm responsible for now. And it still has limits. 3. Randomly assign a contact person within the company for every signup. And automate the insertion of their signature in every email. This however has issues with turnover, and the voice of the emails. So far, I think what works best is automated (but specific) emails from me, the CEO. And then introductions to the rest of the team for problem resolution. I'd love to hear what others think works best.

rmaccloy 14y ago
Even if the reply-to just dumps responses into a customer support queue, that's better than 90% of mass mail is doing. Separately, I think it's great if you can have all of your employees involved in the support and outreach process, but that's a cultural thing and thus a bit harder than changing a mail header.
- sudonim 14y ago
  Yes, I think all employees involved is a huge win. In our company of 3, we do that. But one thing that's problematic from the customer's point of view, is: "Who should I contact to solve my problem?" The ideal experience in my opinion is a single contact point, with the authority and knowledge to solve every issue you have. That's of course unrealistic, but I want to find a way to approximate that. The closest thing I've heard is Alla Klein: http://code.dblock.org/alla-klein-a-fake-person-in-charge-of-customer-support http://code.dblock.org/alla-klein-a-fake-person-in-charge-of...
- eli 14y ago
  My startup never uses no-reply and someone reads pretty much every reply. But note that this is not zero cost. The time your support staff spends deleting out of office replies and spam is time they aren't helping real people.

solox3 14y ago

Well, yes. If your email is sent such that you welcome replies, you don't use noreply@example.com.

kosei 14y ago

I think this message is geared toward startups. But it's not explicit. It's a good point for startups to try to increase the understanding of their customers. But obviously is not relevant for companies with much larger reach.

dantiberian 14y ago

This is useful in some situations but a large amount of transactional email doesn't and shouldn't have replies made to it. As with almost all advice that you find in blog posts, it works in one situation but is presented as an answer to every situation. Instead of arguing in the comments about whether or not this would work for your company for every email, try and suggest places where this would be useful.

nhangen 14y ago

I agree. It doesn't require anything extra to use an email address that accepts replies. Even if they go into a dark hole and are never read, at least you aren't sending a message that you don't care what the receiver thinks. When I receive a no reply, I assume that the company doesn't care about my opinion as it relates to their communication, and in that case, I share the sentiment. It leaves a bad taste in my mouth. The exception, I suppose, would be something like an Amazon email notifying me of related products.

mattangriffel 14y ago

It seems to me that well thought out email marketing should take responses into account as part of the funnel. That being said, I haven't seen any good examples besides just forwarding responses to a customer service queue, as rmaccloy mentions. The point of email marketing is that it scales, and you can do testing. One on one communication is almost the opposite. Companies shouldn't have to choose between one or the other.

_delirium 14y ago

I vaguely agree; when I see that wordy explanation about "this is sent from a blah blah replies won't be blah blah" I tend to read it uncharitably, even though I know why they do it. My first read of it, somewhat involuntarily, is along the lines of: wow, these people can't even deal with the use-case of someone replying to this email, and are so befuddled by the possibility that the best workaround they could think of was to tack on this wordy disclaimer in the email, begging people not to hit "reply".

sandimac 14y ago

It's definitely not easy to do at scale, if possible at all. I'm still in the early stages with the product, so at this point (and with this particular type of product) the personal, un-scalable approach makes sense. The style of email that I sent to Ryan, and the one that I describe in the post that he links to, is only for people that are arriving through 'warm' connections (e.g. a colleague told them about the site), versus arriving through twitter, search, etc. For completely cold connections, I use a slightly less personal approach. I shared a post about that here last week, and there were some great comments - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4527094 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4527094. That method still requires some effort from a real person, but doesn't include any actual 'research'.

notatoad 14y ago

This makes the rounds of the blogs every couple weeks, and yeah... If you use noreply@, you're going to negatively impact user engagement. But in reality, sometimes you just don't have time to talk to users. At least, not all of them. I have time to provide good service to a limited number of my customers every day. Meaningless feel-good interactions reduce the number of meaningful interactions I can have. I check the no-reply inbox every couple days anyways, and in general the people who send email to that address instead of seeking out the support email on my homepage are the customers I'd rather lose. It's a good filter.

alttag 14y ago
I once spent some time chatting with a guy who ran a handful of fire-and-forget IT side-businesses, including wifi/hotspot internet access. His customer service philosophy was very simple: either you use and like the service, or he refunds the money. It wasn't altruism, it was self-interest. He didn't have time to do customer support, and was very blunt about it. Either customers corrected their own issues, or they were no longer customers. This was one of the ways he was able to have time for his several companies.

nagrom 14y ago

On a similar topic from a recent experience...I recently got into a conversation with KLM about delayed luggage. You fill in a web form that emails them with your complaint. They reply to your email address. If you reply to their email, you get an automated email back saying that they didn't receive your response and that all information must be communicated via a web form. So now you must go into your sent box, copy the email and then go to the link on the klm.com website. You find your reference number, put it in and then paste the text of your email into the text box...and hopefully get a reply. (It's been 3 days.) It really amazes me that companies are so bad at communication.

Roelven 14y ago

I don't agree with this. Having worked on the product side of several larger scale email infrastructures, it's impossible to scale this correctly. Yes, we all want to talk less with robots and appreciate getting a reply from a human, but if you're a web company looking to grow your product to be used by millions, you can't get this to work while keeping your co-workers happy (when I discussed something similar with our community support team they looked at me like they wanted to kill me). There might be a way to scale it by filtering messages and sending certain replies on certain topics, but then again, your support team will ask you where the reply address will redirect to. Who will manage that inbox? Who needs to reply those emails? Do you want to increase the load on your support guys even more?

IsTom 14y ago

I think this is a bad idea for the user in the long run, perhaps not only for the user. Think about how long does it take you now to recoginze and (not) read noreply@ e-mails? How long will this take when they are actually directed to you? There's enough distractions on the internet already and if more companies start doing this it will probably result in another arms race.

webjunkie 14y ago

I don't think noreply is about not wanting people to respond to your messages. It is rather a solution for all the garbage you get back when sending out email to thousands of people. You will get many many mailer deamon mails for people who typed their addresses wrong or whose mailbox is full (yes, there are still webhosts that have a 20 MB limit apparently). Filtering all this stuff takes lots of effort and seems like a bad thing to spent time on when you can just use noreply and include a "Have questions? Email us at service@example.com" line.

andyjpb 14y ago
This is why Reply-To, Errors-To, From, MAIL-From, Sender, etc. are all separate headers.
jewel 14y ago
Bounces should go to the "envelope from address", which is different than the from address in the actual email. The way I've set this up before had the envelope from address be "bounce-$user_id@companydomain.com" so that we could identify bad addresses, but any replies from humans go to someone directly. You can also use the Reply-To header to achieve the same result.
- riobard 14y ago
  Yes, in theory. Unless you run into a not-so-compliant mail daemon…