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:
This is odd, what do you gain from this? Chances are this will not get seen on the sender's end, and if it does they won't care, statistically speaking. Many noreply addresses are transactional emails (ie, emails you trigger by doing an action), so it seems maintaining a whitelist would be a chore.
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.
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.
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.
This has been our experience as well, though maybe it's different for purely B2B communications. We're mostly B2C, and we've never found out-of-office replies to be a significant problem.
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.
For both customers and 'potential customers' you'd need classification staff to categorize the mail. Their jobs might be made easier by machine learning providing them a guess to confirm, but it is important to have a human involved as actually intelligent verification (and additional training in some cases).
Obviously non-customers would be fed over to either sales directly or a Sales Engineer.
Perhaps startups should send email from [email protected] 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."
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. [email protected] or [email protected] routed to the correct customer service teams).
Yes, we do this; it seems to be both the correct solution, and one which works effectively in practice -- use email properly.
Auto responders generally send their messages to the mail Sender. That seems correct to me. We send automated mail from robot@, with a Reply-to of support@ -- because that's logically what's happening.
All of bounces just end up back at the robot, and IMO that's where they belong (and potentially can even be dealt with automatically). The vast majority of out-of-office do that too. And humans end up emailing support.
The name 'robot' was chosen to gently imply to the user a few things.
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.
> 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.
If I give them my personal email address (risking low-quality spammy email) then they should at least give me a real corporate address when they send me an email, accepting the risk of a low-quality spammy reply. That's power symmetry.
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.
First, it's ok for the company to send confidential info via email? I don't think so. Email is not a secure transport mechanism.
Second, email accounts are often the target of phishing and cyber attacks, so that's the last place you should enable the customer to store sensitive information.
Third, how does "noreply@" actually prevent the customer from sending a reply, disclosing the confidential information at every hop along the way to being bounced by your server? It doesn't. Or to "support" personnel; well maybe if you exclude your admins from the "support" classification but they're likely collecting those emails in an unnamed inbox or logging them somewhere? And what if the customer's (possibly third-party) admins are collecting bounces as they proactively monitor SMTP reputation for the domain and IP address?
Please, just erase the idea that it's ok to send confidential information via email from your head. Send a link to a password-protected page. If you want to be extra vigilant, require temp password via SMS to reset that password. And if you want to be hyper-vigilant, use TOTP as a 2FA mechanism for password reset. And if it really requires secrecy, send it via courier followed by an assassin to kill the courier. (Joking, not an incitement to criminal activity)
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.
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.
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.
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)
Not sure this is entirely true. RFC 3848 (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.
Why would you want to talk only to customers who "really want" to talk to you? Instead of all your customers, who are a superset of that group and don't always have the same needs?
What about all the emails that get sent to people who aren't customers yet and just have a simple question that isn't covered by the FAQ?
They'll see noreply@, and not bother to dig up a support email address and forget about your company's offerings.
However, seeing a welcoming replieswelcome@ email, they can ask their simple question while they're thinking of it, which then becomes a warm lead, and possibly even convert into a paying customer.
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.
[+] [-] kazinator|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ryeguy|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bitJericho|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sparrish|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Silhouette|8 years ago|reply
This has been our experience as well, though maybe it's different for purely B2B communications. We're mostly B2C, and we've never found out-of-office replies to be a significant problem.
[+] [-] tmnvix|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eloisant|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] mjevans|8 years ago|reply
Obviously non-customers would be fed over to either sales directly or a Sales Engineer.
[+] [-] bitJericho|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Chirael|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] steventhedev|8 years ago|reply
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. [email protected] or [email protected] routed to the correct customer service teams).
[+] [-] ninov|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zbuf|8 years ago|reply
Auto responders generally send their messages to the mail Sender. That seems correct to me. We send automated mail from robot@, with a Reply-to of support@ -- because that's logically what's happening.
All of bounces just end up back at the robot, and IMO that's where they belong (and potentially can even be dealt with automatically). The vast majority of out-of-office do that too. And humans end up emailing support.
The name 'robot' was chosen to gently imply to the user a few things.
[+] [-] nwah1|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eridius|8 years ago|reply
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|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zeveb|8 years ago|reply
If I give them my personal email address (risking low-quality spammy email) then they should at least give me a real corporate address when they send me an email, accepting the risk of a low-quality spammy reply. That's power symmetry.
[+] [-] benjohnson|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dylanpyle|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CodeWriter23|8 years ago|reply
First, it's ok for the company to send confidential info via email? I don't think so. Email is not a secure transport mechanism.
Second, email accounts are often the target of phishing and cyber attacks, so that's the last place you should enable the customer to store sensitive information.
Third, how does "noreply@" actually prevent the customer from sending a reply, disclosing the confidential information at every hop along the way to being bounced by your server? It doesn't. Or to "support" personnel; well maybe if you exclude your admins from the "support" classification but they're likely collecting those emails in an unnamed inbox or logging them somewhere? And what if the customer's (possibly third-party) admins are collecting bounces as they proactively monitor SMTP reputation for the domain and IP address?
Please, just erase the idea that it's ok to send confidential information via email from your head. Send a link to a password-protected page. If you want to be extra vigilant, require temp password via SMS to reset that password. And if you want to be hyper-vigilant, use TOTP as a 2FA mechanism for password reset. And if it really requires secrecy, send it via courier followed by an assassin to kill the courier. (Joking, not an incitement to criminal activity)
[+] [-] jacobparker|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] mattlondon|8 years ago|reply
Others probably exist, but that is the one I know about.
[+] [-] jpalomaki|8 years ago|reply
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|8 years ago|reply
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|8 years ago|reply
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)
[+] [-] jenscow|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] warrenski|8 years ago|reply
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|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Walkman|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hinkley|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] petraeus|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] NegativeK|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eropple|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fragmede|8 years ago|reply
They'll see noreply@, and not bother to dig up a support email address and forget about your company's offerings.
However, seeing a welcoming replieswelcome@ email, they can ask their simple question while they're thinking of it, which then becomes a warm lead, and possibly even convert into a paying customer.
[+] [-] sigzero|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zwerdlds|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] honi|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bitJericho|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iffycan|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] janwh|8 years ago|reply
/s
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] 0xdeadbeefbabe|8 years ago|reply
I feel like this predicament resembles the story in the children's book: Half Magic (http://a.co/e8JrhbU).
[+] [-] vmarquet|8 years ago|reply
And this post makes me hunt google to find what "kthxbye" means...