
Startups, Fix Your "From" Field - jazzychad
http://blog.jazzychad.net/2012/03/24/startups-fix-your-from-field.html
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rmorrison
Related: I don't understand why companies use a "noreply@..." email address.
Why not make it easy for a customer to give you feedback?

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smsm42
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.

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RossM
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.

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smsm42
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".

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MBCook
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).

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zrail
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_

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yesimahuman
One I've noticed people using recently and that I use is "Firstname from
Company" as the name. Seems to work well, since it's both personable and clear
what you are emailing about.

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mgkimsal
On a related note (email addresses), how about we standardize email address
regex/verifications to accept "Foo Bar" <foobar@yahoo.com> formats? I'm tired
of grabbing an address, hitting 'copy', then not being able to paste it
anywhere without having to essentially retype _just_ the stuff between < >.
Apple Mail is bad about the 'copy', but I've noticed it with some other apps,
and _nothing_ lets me paste in the full version. :/

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cflee
One annoying thing is that some programs want you to separate different email
addresses with semicolons and some with commas. It's another hassle to
translate between those two conventions.

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TeamAqua
I also wish that startups would use a bit more "personable" email address.
Emails from donotreply@what.ever or invalid@examp.le just look odd. Instead,
the reply-to email should alias to your help email address, to simplify
sending requests for help, or just sending comments and feedback.

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RossM
I've always found it weird that email - a two-way system supposed to be
analogous to letters - has so many occurrences of noreply@example.com. I
wonder what percentage of emails end up in these unmonitored mailboxes.

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lbotos
I think it comes from the parallels to physical bulk mailing. I usually get
sales flyers, various "junk" mail and the not-as-often "we've moved funds from
one account to another because a check didn't clear" from my bank. I equate
most of these to something that would come from a no-reply email. Also, I do
believe it's possible to have a send only mailbox that won't even accept
incoming mail. It would drop the mail on the floor without you knowing.

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verelo
This is a great post, redmine ticket has been submitted, its something we're
guilty of. I completely agree that a name is important, and to reiterate what
others are saying here I also agree that email addresses you cant reply to are
useless.

Thanks for sharing, the internet is a better place for it :P

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badclient
In some cases it may be intentional. I am unlikely to open an email from
startup X if months ago I reached a negative judgement about startup X.

On the other hand, if the From field only says "John" or "notification", I may
open the email even if just for a second.

Also, note the branding value of having your company name in the from field. I
receive emails from some sites that I no longer visit. Yet, just seeing their
name day in and day out in my email makes me remember their name/brand.

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lotharbot
> _"if the From field only says "John" or "notification", I may open the email
> even if just for a second."_

I'm completely opposite. If I don't recognize the name in the From field and
the company name isn't in the subject line, it gets categorized as _SPAM_.

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badclient
So, if you meet ten John Schmidts at a conference and 7 of them email you, you
remember all their names? Or you just hit delete?

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rhizome
If I was one of those John Schmidts, I would mention the conference. I think
this is just a question of providing context in a world of email inundation.

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tedyoung
Also bad is when the emailing service that you use creates new and random
"From" addresses for every single email. That means if I want to see images
from you in Gmail or Outlook, I have to do it for _every_ single email I get
from you. I'm looking at you, Twitter, with your
n-grqlbhat=tznvy.pbz-302c1@postmaster.twitter.com "from" addresses and anyone
using whatever service results in "EAT Club
[support=myeatclub.com@mail13.us2.mcsv.net]".

~~~
there
That is done to track bounces. If an automated email is sent to an address,
but that address is setup to forward once or twice and bounces somewhere along
that path, by the time the bounce gets back to the original (automated)
sender, it may otherwise be impossible to figure out what the original address
was. With unique addresses like that, bounces can be tracked.

~~~
kijin
Doesn't a bounce usually include the Message-ID of the original message, along
with a lot of other cruft? I can understand small teams doing this as a quick
fix, but companies like Twitter should have no trouble keeping a large dict of
Message-ID => account ID.

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cflee
'Usually' but definitely not always. Account ID is also usually at the
application level, while Message-ID originates lower, at the mailserver level.
When the app posts something off to the mailserver, how is it supposed to get
the Message-ID back?

At least with the cruft, bounces are just handed back to the app to deal with.

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kijin
An app can generate its own Message-IDs. MTAs will respect them.

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darxius
The important point this post makes is the issue of an ambiguous subject line.
I had never thought of it before, but not putting a company name in the
subject makes the email look much less credible and increases the chance of me
flagging it as spam.

Thank you for this enlightening post.

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MatthewPhillips
Also, don't send me emails unless I explicitly opted in or there is a fire I
should know about.

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prawn
In the examples of subject lines including a company name, I would only
recommend:

Company Name: Check out this new feature

Enables people to easily find something by sorting alphabetically in case they
cannot remember the company name in full. I do the same thing with
downloadable files.

My Downloads folder is full of things like Summer-menu.pdf or menu.pdf when
I'd rather have Celcius_Summer_menu.pdf.

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devicenull
Or even worse, 'Setup.exe'

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snotrockets
That's easy! It's cygwin's :-)

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dennisgorelik
We are sending automated emails mostly from noreply@ address, but I still read
everything that comes to noreply@.

We are sending ~300K+ emails per month. Reading bounces (and replies) is quite
manageable. The worst offenders are ending up in spam folder anyway.

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mmuro
This shouldn't just apply to Startups. It should apply to most emails sent by
a server.

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c4urself
I admit I didn't think of this and it's a really easy fix.

In the case of Django: DEFAULT_FROM_EMAIL = "My Company Name
<somegirlname@mycompany.com>" is _all_ you need to do :)

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ubuntuftw
This is great. I'm sorry to say that my startup was guilty of this as well.
Not anymore though. Thanks for your article.

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gmansoor
I like LinkedIn way "Person Name via LinkedIn"<...@linkedin.com>. This shows
person name and name of service.

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dmils4
Right up there with fixing your "From" field is using spell check on your blog
posts. :0)

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jazzychad
I agree. I admit I'm a terrible speller. Perhaps you could tell me what I
misspelled?

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dmils4
Ha, sorry. I was just nitpicking to nitpick.

"Here is an exmaple from a new startup whose website I joined yesterday:"

