
Let’s kill no-reply - 0xdeadbeefbabe
https://medium.com/@iffy/lets-kill-no-reply-d451c80ba8be
======
kazinator
I wholeheartedly agree with these bloggers in despising the "noreply"
practice, and here is a rule in my Exim mail server config that I've had there
for years:

    
    
      deny
        message = MYDOM does not accept SMTP traffic from "noreply" senders. \
                  E-mail is a "two-way street". \
                  If you want us to accept \
                  your mail, then please accept replies.
        senders = ^.*noreply.*\$ : ^.*do.*not.*reply.*\$
    

Unfortunately, this has to be immediately followed by a whitelist:

    
    
        !senders = *@sourceforge.net : github.com : [ ... others ]

~~~
bitJericho
Having managed email queues, the no reply email is essential, because everyone
and their uncle uses auto replies. That said, I'm all for including a real
email address somewhere so a user can reply.

~~~
Rjevski
Auto relies could easily be weeded out with some simple code.

~~~
bitJericho
I've never seen it. I'm sure that works "in theory"

~~~
burkaman
Couldn't you filter most of them out by the timestamp? If you get a reply that
was sent faster than a human could have responded, ignore it.

~~~
icebraining
The auto-reply is probably sent by a desktop email client, which are often
offline and/or configured to only check for new email every few minutes. So
you'd fail to mark a lot of auto-replies.

~~~
TheSmiddy
Exchange configures it on the server because generally people have their
computers turned off when on holidays.

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sparrish
We decided against 'no-reply' emails when we started our business 6 years ago
and it's been a great way to get our customers to engage with us.

Every email we send out has a blurb like this:

"Please let us know if you have any questions. You may reply to this email or
reach us at support@..."

Yes, we get some bounces and vacation/out of office auto-replies but the
benefits far outweigh having to delete a few auto-replies that got through the
filters.

~~~
tmnvix
Are you dealing with 10s, 100s, or 1000s of customers?

~~~
sparrish
1000s

------
eloisant
It's actually very easy, just feed the responses to your customer support
service. Since it's an email you know, it will be associated to the customer
account.

Not only it's good for the customers, it's good for you because you definitely
want customers to contact you when they have a problem (or when they believe
you're sending too many emails). You want them to contact you to give you a
chance to make them happy customer who stay with you, not grumpy customer who
quit your service before even giving you an opportunity to fix their problem.

~~~
bitJericho
I've worked email queues. The customer's account will be full of auto-
responders and it'll be impossible to find the real communications.

~~~
BillinghamJ
That's highly disingenuous. Unless you've been spamming your users, it's
typical that less than 1% of emails are automated responses. These can be
deleted/skipped very quickly.

In my company's case, it's more like 0.1%, but perhaps some are higher.

~~~
bitJericho
When you have tens of thousands of customers that's a lot of emails.

~~~
umurkontaci
I think that's the point of the article too. If you are not prepared to handle
1% auto-responder rate which you can weed out which some code; you are sending
too many emails.

------
Chirael
Perhaps startups should send email from replieswelcome@startup.com to
encourage customer feedback and iterate faster? As pg wrote in Do Things that
Don't Scale, "The feedback you get from engaging directly with your earliest
users will be the best you ever get... That's one advantage of being small:
you can provide a level of service no big company can."

~~~
steventhedev
For a smaller startup (< 10 people), I'd recommend going with a person's
email. Bonus points if you use your own.

We do that and get the occasional reply, but when we do, people are usually
happy to get a quick, personal response.

Once you're larger, using more purpose-suited emails that route correctly is
better (e.g. marketing@example.com or billing@example.com routed to the
correct customer service teams).

~~~
stordoff
Possibly a personal quirk of mine, but I've never really liked that for
automated emails. Getting an automated sign-up email from name@company just
feels disingenuous to me.

Similar with the hi@company suggested below - I've seen hello@company used a
lot (PR companies seem to love it) and always found it weird to not know who
(person or role) I am addressing.

~~~
steventhedev
I always tack on a "this email is automated, but responses will be read by a
human". You can also set the reply to header for a person/role, so you could
use accounts@example.com.

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ninov
Companies often use noreply@… as sender and add a real address as Reply-To so
their staff does not have to deal with bounce messages.

~~~
nwah1
Hackish workarounds will be the death of us.

~~~
bitJericho
Hackish? This is a great design:
[http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Mai...](http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Mail-
Headers.html)

~~~
KGIII
As near ad I can tell, the whole damned Internet is pretty much hackish
workarounds. It's not amazing when something breaks, it's amazing that it
works at all. From HTML being used for more than markup, to NAT routing, to a
complete disregard for standards...

It's kinda impressive, actually.

------
eridius
Companies should definitely have an easily-discovered means of contacting them
if you have a concern about an email you received.

But actually allowing replies to the email itself is just asking to get a lot
of low-quality spammy replies that now you have to pay someone to wade
through.

~~~
mikehall314
And bounces, and out of office autoresponders, and so on

~~~
STRML
We do it anyway. It's easy enough to filter those types of emails. I think
it's a huge plus for customer service to be able to say "Have a problem or
question? Just reply..."

~~~
nsxwolf
How do you know if you've been filtered? Not getting a response would lead to
a lot of frustration.

~~~
STRML
We only set really obvious filters, as to filter too little than too much. But
of course, it's not perfect every time.

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dylanpyle
I've seen noreply@ useful/necessary in cases where the original message
contained sensitive information that you wouldn't want forwarded to support
staff if someone chose to reply.

~~~
jacobparker
That's sounds pretty easy to solve redacting the sensitive content when it
hits your mail server before going to support staff. If you're sending out
HTML email you can also make easy and extensible by having a custom class for
redactable contents.

Realistically customers are going to fwd those emails anyway so this approach
is more robust.

It seems like most information in these emails would be available to support
staff typically though. It sounds like a niche case.

~~~
pavel_lishin
> _That 's sounds pretty easy to solve_

Everything does if you just glance at someone's comment online and dash one
off.

How do you recognize which is the sensitive content and which isn't? How do
you handle the case where you send out HTML emails, but the response strips
all of the HTML and sends plain text back?

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jpalomaki
This certainly also has to do with the value of the customer. If you are an
insurance company the value of the customer may be measured in thousands of
$$$. If you are a lean e-commerce middleman the value you extract from
ordinary end-customer might be some cents. Engaging with the customer in email
conversation may cost tens of dollars.

While customers may love email, some (many?) customer service people actually
don't. The trouble I have heard couple of times is that with email you usually
never manage to solve the issue in one pass. Customer fires off email with
insufficient details. Your service center checks the case, asks for more
details. Customer does not respond immediately. When the reply comes, the
person who originally handled the cases is not at work or has forgotten the
details. You can call up the customer - if the customer has provided you the
number, but that has it's own challenges. Customer can't talk right now, you
need to call back at certain time etc.

In some cases it simply does not work out financially to provide personalized
customer service. Too many customers are so cheap that they prefer to deal
with your competitor who automates things.

------
jklein11
This seems like a problem that could be solved by micropayments for sending
and receiving emails.

I've seen proposals[1] for a solution where the sender of an email pays a
small fee to the recipient of the email. If you are sending as much email as
you are receiving you wouldn't have to worry about using up your email. If you
are sending a mass email, you will end up paying for it.

In the case of no-replies, it would discourage the sender from sending an
email that doesn't need to be replied to.

------
tscs37
I've personally setup noreply accounts for some selfhosted services.

These emails are truly noreply, there is no inbox, any incoming mail is
blackholed. There is no sense in receiving it, it's automated and the software
does not react to incoming mails. There is no reason to reply, there is no
sense in replying, there is no way to reply, why demand the ability to reply?

Why would I have me reading the garbage that piles up there? If you have a
problem, contact postmaster/webmaster/root/etc.

If _I_ send you mail from a real human account, you can reply there. Simple as
that.

It seems a bit like someone demanding that the radio should respond to their
choice of music. Sure, if you want that, get a music app (aka a meat-email)
and stop listening to the radio (aka the machine-email)

~~~
sp332
Why not send the email "From" postmaster/webmaster etc in the first place, or
at least set the Reply-To header to that?

~~~
tscs37
Because there is no reason for it. If you have a problem there is a contact
email in every mail included.

I do not feel like I should be sending mail from postmaster and the reply-to
header does not feel any more appropriate.

These emails are 100 percent automatic and do not require you to reply. Ever.

------
jenscow
It's done to prevent a loop where an automated response causes an automated
response.

~~~
warrenski
Not sure this is entirely true. RFC 3848 ([http://www.rfc-
base.org/txt/rfc-3834.txt](http://www.rfc-base.org/txt/rfc-3834.txt)) covers
the implementation detail, and a lot of consideration was given to the
prevention of email loops.

Section 4 states that auto-responders should send the response to the email
address given by the Return-Path header (usually set to a VERP address for
identification of bounces) or if absent then fall back to the email address
given in the From header.

------
mv4
I agree wholeheartedly. This practice is up there with "No Caller ID" calls.

------
Walkman
I always wondered why is this and I think it's just a habit and somebody do it
because everybody else is doing it.

~~~
hinkley
Fake it until you make it.

------
petraeus
If a customer really wants to contact you they'll find a way. Life always
finds a way.

~~~
sigzero
I did get the Ian Malcolm reference.

~~~
hinkley
I always preferred his line from he sequel:

    
    
        "Oooh, Ahh", that's how it always starts.  But then later there's running, and screaming.

------
honi
Send as noreply@ with reply-to header pointing to a valid address.

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bitJericho
TLDR, an article by someone who doesn't know how email works nor how companies
use email queues.

~~~
iffycan
Author here.

I'm writing from the perspective of a customer. As a customer, I don't care
how your email queues work. I do care that you sent me an email and forbid me
from replying to it. It chafes. And you want my money?

From the perspective of a company, I can sympathize. I've been directed to
create noreply-sending mailers in the course of my job. In every case, it
would have been better sent from support@, but because of understandable but
dumb reasons (bureaucratic laziness; not-my-problem-itis), it's way easier
just to turn on the mailing hose and forget replies. So that's what we did.

I've also worked on handling bounces of both email replies and (cringe) faxes.
Yes, handling bounces can be annoying, but to create a good customer
experience I think it's worth the cost.

~~~
snarf21
I hope I don't seem critical because that is not my intent. It seems like this
is about misusing no-reply@ not that no-reply@ is inherently bad. Github
completing a merge of a branch onto master seems like a fine use case for no-
reply@. Using no-reply@ to tell someone they are overdue on their bill is not.
Or are you saying there is literally _never_ a reason for a no-reply@ address?

Additionally, if a service is over sending, there are lots of unsubscribe laws
and rules to address that to your own personal preference.

~~~
iffycan
I won't say never. I think your distinction (GitHub merge vs bill overdue)
might strike the right balance, but I'm having trouble sorting out what the
principle is that distinguishes those two.

As I've never even paid attention to the sending address of GitHub merge
notifications, perhaps the principle is: "If someone notices that your email
came from noreply@ then you shouldn't use noreply@"

(And, no, you don't seem critical -- more like thoughtful)

------
janwh
Thank god, a Medium post on how to fix email. Guess that's fixed now, isn't
it?

/s

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0xdeadbeefbabe
If slack can disrupt chat, then maybe another company can disrupt no-reply.

I feel like this predicament resembles the story in the children's book: Half
Magic ([http://a.co/e8JrhbU](http://a.co/e8JrhbU)).

------
vmarquet
"Don’t make me hunt for a way to ask it."

And this post makes me hunt google to find what "kthxbye" means...

