
No-reply emails from businesses shouldn’t be allowed - social_quotient
Why can a business send an actionable correspondence without a reply channel? What’s the sentiment around this line of thinking?
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schwartzworld
Counterpoint: 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.

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oliwarner
Isn't that the point of this post? Force companies sending email commercially
commercial to process a reply.

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JaggedJax
While 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.

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tinus_hn
Surprise! If you’re a government it’s pretty easy to require this. You just
require it and it’s required.

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jpindar
So you're not going to allow explicit no-reply addresses. Then they'll just
ignore all incoming mail to the sending address. Or are you going to require
that all businesses respond to all emails they receive? Will an automated
response do?

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tinus_hn
If you are government you can just say there needs to be an email address and
reasonable requests to that address have to be responded to in a reasonable
amount of time.

The rest can be handled by the courts. It’s not that difficult, really.

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clusterfish
Such vague laws are costly bullshit to everyone involved. How many times did
you personally advance the legal precedent on your own dime to be so content
with that approach?

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tinus_hn
That’s the choice you make. You can either offer a working return address or
you can waste your time and money ‘advancing the legal precedent’.

~~~
clusterfish
I said you personally, that is, as a violated consumer suing a business.

If you don't want to waste your own life fighting over your proposed vague law
in court, you have no business to impose that on others.

All too easy to propose a crap solution when it won't be you paying the price.

~~~
tinus_hn
Consumers indeed have no business imposing laws on others. That’s the job of
governments, as is enforcing laws.

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toast0
Too 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.

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codingdave
For 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.

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jhardy54
Why not just send emails from an address that's monitored instead?

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davidbanham
Because 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.

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anoncake
Easy solution: Mandate that auto responses are marked as such in a header.

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sebastien_b
Obvious problem: the same impossibility if enforcing this applies to this
solution as well.

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anoncake
Neither is impossible to enforce.

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sebastien_b
Please do explain how.

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anoncake
You want me to explain the concept of law enforcement? Or of fines? You're the
one making a strong claim here.

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caryd
You try dealing with a million responses on every campaign and let us know how
it worked out

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TheCoelacanth
If 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.

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joshuamorton
I 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
I 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.

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arrty88
Twitter is the defacto location to contact most businesses these days when you
can’t get a hold of someone easily.

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hactually
woah, hard pass!

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gitgud
What would be an example reply to an automated email notification?

It would be like replying to a push notification on your phone...

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social_quotient
IMO 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.

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thatha7777
Yes, this. I’m sick of finding contact forms to respond to incorrectly issued
invoices.

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x0x0
Just don't pay them. They'll reach out.

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TristanBall
Ha.. 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
Fortunately, 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.

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acdha
Businesses 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.

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afarrell
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publish%E2%80%93subscribe_patt...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publish%E2%80%93subscribe_pattern)

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villgax
It'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.

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runjake
s/allowed/tolerated/

I don't think this requires regulation, which is what the word "allowed"
implies.

~~~
social_quotient
It 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!

