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Comment by eridius | Hacker News Reader

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.

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

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..."

Sure. And I think that's a better approach, on balance.

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

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

Having worked in email queues, filters are nowhere near good enough. Nothing is more infuriating than wasting hours on bounces.

> 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.

And a crazy amount of "I'm on vacation" auto replies.

We could have a mail field indicating if vacation replies are wanted.

    X-WantVacationReplies: no

Or headers in the auto-reply mail which tag it as being auto-reply.

These exist!

https://stackoverflow.com/a/10839343/1250772

This answer points at RFC containing recommendations for auto-reply e-mails, and specifies a header to use.

Any new proposal will fall victim to the same opt-in problem to an even greater degree; if developers of auto-responders can't be bothered to follow this RFC, they will also ignore even newer recommendations.

or.. you know, a reply-to header where real emails can be sent to...

But if I'm on vacation, I don't want to read your email right now. I'm just letting you know that your email might not get a reply, especially not any time soon.

Yeah, it seems like it's providing meta-information about the status of the email address owner rather than actually conveying information from the owner of the email address. Perhaps there should be a separate channel for such meta information.

If you have a good quality customer support/CRM tool it should take care of the most obvious, connect to the corresponding customer, and be easy to manage.

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