No-reply emails from businesses shouldn’t be allowed | Hacker News Reader

No-reply emails from businesses shouldn’t be allowed

Why can a business send an actionable correspondence without a reply channel? What’s the sentiment around this line of thinking?

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Counterpoint: regardless of what address is used, nobody can force a business to actually check and respond to emails. A no-reply address is at least a transparent statement that your response will go unaddressed.

Isn't that the point of this post? Force companies sending email commercially commercial to process a reply.

While this can be very annoying, I have two thoughts on this.

First, I'd say there is no practical way to "require" this. Some companies are just going to suck here and we should avoid them when possible.

Second, lots of the comments focus on never allowing "no reply" addresses, but in my experience we're monitoring and sending out automated alerts and notifications to our customers. We include a link for more info/actions and a clear email address for contacting support. Before we switched to sending from a no-reply address we were bombarded with out of office emails (this is a B2B platform). As a small team it was significantly slowing down our ability to reply to real support issues quickly. If there was a better OOO system widely used that didn't send an email to my support I would gladly switch back.

Surprise! If you’re a government it’s pretty easy to require this. You just require it and it’s required.

So true. Let's hope we don't have to go that far with every country imposing their rule on every person in the world. We have too much of that already.

You have to be a dictatorship, though, because it's pretty hard to imagine any representative government wanting this.

And it's pretty hard to be a dictatorship and remain in power, actually. More so if you give businesses a financial reason and not just a moral one to leave.

You mean in the same way that spam email and spam calls to mobile numbers where it might actually cost folks money to answer are illegal in the US? Yeah, those requirements are so effective.

Yes, exactly the same way. European carriers are liable for those and nobody I know in Europe has a problem. American carriers have successfully convinced politicians and “libertarians” that they shouldn’t be expected to validate network access since not accepting money to deliver spam would reduce their profits by a trivial fraction.

So you're not going to allow explicit no-reply addresses. Then they'll just ignore all incoming mail to the sending address. Or are you going to require that all businesses respond to all emails they receive? Will an automated response do?

If you are government you can just say there needs to be an email address and reasonable requests to that address have to be responded to in a reasonable amount of time.

The rest can be handled by the courts. It’s not that difficult, really.

Such vague laws are costly bullshit to everyone involved. How many times did you personally advance the legal precedent on your own dime to be so content with that approach?

That’s the choice you make. You can either offer a working return address or you can waste your time and money ‘advancing the legal precedent’.

I said you personally, that is, as a violated consumer suing a business.

If you don't want to waste your own life fighting over your proposed vague law in court, you have no business to impose that on others.

All too easy to propose a crap solution when it won't be you paying the price.

Consumers indeed have no business imposing laws on others. That’s the job of governments, as is enforcing laws.

I understand your point, but many of the no-reply (most) do not encode an email or website if you needed to talk with someone.

Of course saying no replay is better than auto forward to bit/bucket.

I don't think regulation is the answer here though. I hope bringing this up and shaming or leaving companies that do thisis enough. And if it's not a service you can unsubscribe from, straight to spam it should go.

Too many out of office style autoresponders reply to everything, even mail properly marked to not generate autoresponders / marking mail so it doesn't trigger causes it to get flagged as spam.

For us, it is because we do want to hear from you, and getting lost in an email shuffle isn't helpful to either one of us. So we send from a no-reply, but include info on all the various ways we do have to get in touch with us. Directly with us, so we can talk immediately and resolve concerns, not have you send emails into a black hole.

Why not just send emails from an address that's monitored instead?

Because then all the robots (vacation responders) reply too. The separate address in the body of the email is a little like a captcha humanity test.

Easy solution: Mandate that auto responses are marked as such in a header.

Obvious problem: the same impossibility if enforcing this applies to this solution as well.

Neither is impossible to enforce.

Please do explain how.

You want me to explain the concept of law enforcement? Or of fines? You're the one making a strong claim here.

Reply to those autoreplies. Crash the mailboxes of people using broken autoresponders.

>but include info on all the various ways we do have to get in touch with us. This is seldom fair. Far too few organizations provide any asynchronous means of contacting them. I instead have to call them and get placed in a hold queue. Complete garbage. I don't want to have a synchronous conversation all of the time.

Then you email us. Direct contact and quick resolutions is what we prefer because we feel its meets our customers needs better. But we don't force it on you. Our email is right next to our phone number in every conversation.

You try dealing with a million responses on every campaign and let us know how it worked out

If the person reviving the email has some benefit, then the business probably has some benefit and can pay someone to read the incoming email.

If not, probably the million emails send in the campaign are just spam.

If you can't handle that many responses, then maybe you just shouldn't be sending out so many emails.

No reply emails are a tacit admission that the emails are low-value spam.

I disagree: I highly value the emails I receive from noreply@hnreplies.com. Same for email from various noreply addressed for google docs, or things like github's notification noreply.

Marketing spam is one, but far from the only, use for noreply emails.

I see subscription feed emails as you describe a bit different from a B2C/B2B email about an account or something specific to me that might require a dialog or reply should something need to be said.

A large part of my job is purchasing newly released products. I highly value marketing emails, that's why I subscribed to them.

I follow a number of repositories on Github, their notifications come from noreply.github.com.

I also like knowing when there are new versions of various assets I've gotten from the Unity asset store, these notifications come from no-reply@unity3d.com.

I am subscribed to the headlines from my local newspapers, one of them is delivered from noreply@patch.com.

My utility company sends payment confirmation emails from noreply@unitil.com.

I like knowing about the occasional blog post from authors I follow on Goodreads, these come from no-reply@mail.goodreads.com

I like knowing when games on my Steam wishlist go on sale, these notifications come from noreply@steampowered.com

I could go on...

If you’re sending millions of messages, you can include links for the most common actions (e.g. real, working unsubscribes).

If you can’t afford to pay people to deal with the remaining replies, you should be better at targeting people who actually want your messages.

Twitter is the defacto location to contact most businesses these days when you can’t get a hold of someone easily.

woah, hard pass!

What would be an example reply to an automated email notification?

It would be like replying to a push notification on your phone...

IMO it’s more like a phone call where it rings, I answer and they can’t hear what I say back to the caller. They just play a user specific recording and then hang up.

In a context like this it feels like a two-way communication medium being abused for 1 way.

Yes, this. I’m sick of finding contact forms to respond to incorrectly issued invoices.

Just don't pay them. They'll reach out.

Ha.. or they'll send multiple invoices from no-reply, then pass you off to debt collection and/or lawyers.

I'd draw a distinction between this kind of email - where a company is at least trying to require you to do something, and which may have ongoing personal or legal or personal ramifications ( e.g., credit score ), and just about any other commercial email, whether it's a "campaign", or automated function alerts or whatever.

Sending invoices from no-reply, with a vague "see our website for contact details" is such terrible customer service that it borders on bullying.

If a business can't deal with all the auto-responders, then the method of response should include enough context that the first person a reach knows what's going on, and is most likely the right person to deal with the response. So, for example a link to a contact form that's prefilled with context information ( like an invoice number, or a ticket number that was auto-created when the invoice was ), and that routes directly to the correct people, eg ccounts, not sales or tech support!

Fortunately, in US you can challenge those fraudulent debt collection attempts and they will be cancelled by default if no human fixes them, or else the collector pays fines to you.

Ha - this is exactly what caused me to post the original submission. A wrongly generated invoice from ADT Security.

Businesses need regulation to address externalities like this. Email is cheaper than almost any other form of messaging but unethical businesses will still try to cut corners if they’re allowed to.

Validating emails is a similar example: it’s trivial to do but marketing weasels think it cuts into their stats and try not to do it. This is how I end up with major companies sending me information like their customers’ names, phone numbers, home addresses, and license plates because protecting their customers’ privacy just isn’t going to happen without significant legal penalties.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publish%E2%80%93subscribe_patt...

It's mostly for automated alerts/notices so that you do in fact ping back with the correct ticket/issue which is traceable in whatever CRM they use.

s/allowed/tolerated/

I don't think this requires regulation, which is what the word "allowed" implies.

It was more from a perspective of return address. If you mail me something I can expect to mail you back at the return address. Imagine the return address on mail being “mail sent to this address will be sent back to you without being read”. Seems weird.

I hadn’t thought of regulation but more of it being a poor CX pattern that businesses shouldn’t do. It seems impolite and I was curious how others saw it. Thx!

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