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Comment by kazinator | Hacker News Reader

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:

    !senders = *@sourceforge.net : github.com : [ ... others ]

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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.

> many noreply addresses are transactional emails

That is correct; for transactional e-mails I use a throwaway e-mail alias system (operated via a web front end). Messages targetting these e-mail aliases bypass all these rules.

Ok, but my core question still stands: why? I'm with you in thinking that noreply addresses should go away, but I don't see how this could be an effective measure to stopping them. A company isn't going to care about this, statistically speaking. Everything you're describing sounds tedious for no gain.

Not having to search sites on how to contact them.

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.

You can configure your email sending with a reply-to email (example customers@mydomain.com) and not have auto replies or bounces go to that reply-to address.

The auto replies will go to the envelope sender email. I prefer to set that to something like email@mydomain.com rather than noreply@mydomain.com because noreply just looks so unfriendly.

Replies from real people will go to the reply-to email (customers@mydomain.com) and bounces/auto-replies will go to the sender address (email@mydomain.com). You can then write a script that automatically clears the auto-replies and handles the bounces from the email@mydomain.com inbox.

This will allow you to still handle real customer inquiries that come into the reply-to email without being bombarded with bounces and auto-replies.

why wouldn't auto-replies go to the reply-to address?

You control this using the Return-Path option in your email headers.

There are common clues an email is an auto-response, too — from timestamp to headers: https://github.com/jpmckinney/multi_mail/wiki/Detecting-auto...

Ah, the old "Be liberal in what you send out, be conservative in what you receive" approach.

If you want to waste money on resolving 6 month out of date vacation replies than be my guest.

I'd rather have the mail admin spend a moment or two putting in a rule that ignores autoreplies

e.g. in another response someone linked https://github.com/jpmckinney/multi_mail/wiki/Detecting-auto...

It's been resolved for many years.

Auto relies could easily be weeded out with some simple code.

One mistake per day is enough for the knives to come out. On a big mailing list, think about how many 9's of accuracy you have to have to keep one incident from happening per day. Per week. Per month.

If you asked people, one per month would be a 'working' system, if you catch them on a good day. 'Never' is a very long time.

I've never seen it. I'm sure that works "in theory"

A quick Google for "outlook autoreply headers" gave me https://www.jitbit.com/maxblog/18-detecting-outlook-autorepl... -- a more comprehensive list of headers is available at https://github.com/jpmckinney/multi_mail/wiki/Detecting-auto...

Will some things filter through this list? Undoubtedly, but I would be surprised if it's a significant percentage. Extremely high-volume lists probably need some more specific care, to be sure.

Couldn't you filter most of them out by the timestamp? If you get a reply that was sent faster than a human could have responded, ignore it.

The auto-reply is probably sent by a desktop email client, which are often offline and/or configured to only check for new email every few minutes. So you'd fail to mark a lot of auto-replies.

Exchange configures it on the server because generally people have their computers turned off when on holidays.

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