

Stop Using noreply - rrhoover
http://ryanhoover.me/post/32059440036/stop-using-noreply

======
greenyoda
"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>

~~~
nhangen
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
Care to share what software Intercom is? Don't seem to find it on typical Mac
download sites or in the app store . . .

~~~
brandnewlow
<http://intercom.io> It's great.

~~~
nhangen
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.

------
Skalman
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.

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nagrom
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.

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sudonim
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
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.

~~~
eli
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.

~~~
jakeludington
It's trivial to filter out of office messages if you use a decent email
program. The false positive rate should be as close to zero as you can get.

Reading every feedback email from every real user teaches you how to create
better products. If you make it clear users can provide feedback, there's an
opportunity from them.

I ask every single real person who leaves my service why they left, which
translates to about 12 emails from me per week. Most of the time, the feedback
isn't actionable, but 2-3 of every 50 emails translate to something I can use
to make my product better.

------
sandimac
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>. That method still requires
some effort from a real person, but doesn't include any actual 'research'.

------
dantiberian
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.

------
webjunkie
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.

~~~
jewel
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
Yes, in theory. Unless you run into a not-so-compliant mail daemon…

------
_delirium
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".

------
Roelven
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?

------
notatoad
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
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.

------
nhangen
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
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.

------
IsTom
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.

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peterjmag
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.

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solox3
Well, yes. If your email is sent such that you welcome replies, you don't use
noreply@example.com.

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kosei
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.

