It's not always this though - I worked support in the past and have seen the annoyingness that two auto-reply systems from different ticketing systems can become. Customer emails us and they get our auto response, which triggers an auto response from their system, which triggers the pre-First Time Response response from ours, which triggers a new ticket from them since the pre-First Time Response response doesn't pull the ticket number from their system's subject line, which in turn triggers another response from this, all the while we're getting spammed with update emails and the case log is bogged down with non-sense. This repeats several times until one side intervenes to ensure their system's automated rules don't catch the support emails for this case.

I understand why we have the no-reply and auto-reply emails, and it makes a lot of sense in many ways, but there's also a very large blind spot where two systems don't realize they're talking to each other and not to humans; the system does exactly what it should be, it's just not what we want it to be doing.

I think that's the point of the article too. If you are not prepared to handle 1% auto-responder rate which you can weed out which some code; you are sending too many emails.

I do, and it isn't a problem. If you have the people needed to handle thousands of emails from customers a day, those same people can very easily filter a couple of hundred automated emails.

What actually is more of a problem is spam and unsolicited non-customer email. But still, it takes half a second to close them.

If all of your customers are on vacation, why are you still emailing them?