Let’s kill no-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.

Obviously non-customers would be fed over to either sales directly or a Sales Engineer.

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).

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.

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.

Others probably exist, but that is the one I know about.

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.

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)

Wouldn't it make sense once in a while to turn on receipt to see how bad your bounce rate is instead of ignoring it?

This is a very outdated 1990s mentality.

Most modern web users would have no idea that such a thing exists (or should exist), and they're probably the same users who also have no idea that WHOIS exists and know how to find contact details for a domain owner using it.

It's also a little user-hostile to assume that nobody is ever going to question something they receive from an automated system. In that case, why make the user journey unnecessarily difficult by forcing them to find an alternative route to contact you?

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.

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.