They told you not to reply (2008)
voices.washingtonpost.com
voices.washingtonpost.com
It’s crazy for companies to discourage replies and force customers to find a different channel when the email itself has all relevant context.
From what I've heard this is not about blocking customer input, but instead became standard due to the sheer amount of auto-reply traffic you're getting. If every one of those mails opens a ticket... Get two systems which send mail receipts in a loop for double the fun.
A second, minor reason might also be that you need to set up a mail ticketing system. That's no problem for a startup, but things might look different for a big company with established support teams of hundreds of people.
The situation might have changed by now, though, as the trend seems to reverse slowly. But as far as I know, these were the reasons on why donotreply@ became so common.
New collaborative email clients make it a lot easier to handle support without ticketing systems.
We still are rather small, so it’s possible we will learn ourselves what all these companies already know, hah.
A factor might also be what kind of mails you send. If it's important stuff for a specific user it make sense to have a direct reply.
If you set a reply address to a newsletter with millions of subscribers the situation probably looks a bit different, especially when said sign up happens without much user input (i.e. "click here to also receive our newsletter").
We use a staff member’s email address on our outbound mail, so that people don’t even need to hesitate before responding.
The thing is, we cannot allow to let a single message land in the wrong inbox for more than 48hours.
Obviously we don’t send “don’t reply e-mails” and we certainly never would from a domain that isn’t even ours, but filtering messages isn’t always easy. Hell, even with the inclusion of actual UUIDs for departments, and a national standard for sending secure business-to-business mail (post includes) that incorporates these standards, and throwing world leading AI science at it with Microsoft/Amazon/IBM behind it, we still employ two full time positions to handle the left overs and mistakes.
Significant percent of these people were on holidays at the time so they responded automatically to each other with "out of office" messages and finally the network couldn't handle it.
Emails are serious business ;)
Those stories are always entertaining. But honestly, those organisations only have themselves to blame.
Filtering and stopping these internal chains shouldn't be any harder than basic spam filtering. Mostly easier, because your filter inputs are not as adversarial.
There's no rocket science here. Especially not today.
You could also 'just' move your company to using Google's corporate gmail offering, and let Google handle those problems for you.
(And if your company doesn't have the capacity to make such a change, they do only have themselves to blame.)
If you don't yet, you will someday.
Bonus that support mails are hidden behind ludicrous forms, terrible website design, images (to prevent spam) and so on.
> "Computer scientists commonly choose models which have bottoms, but prefer them topless."
When I order something I like getting the emails saying 'your package has been shipped...", and they typically come from a donotreply address.
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
In several of my past positions, a large part of my job was purchasing. As such, I needed the many industry newsletters I was subscribed to. In the manufacturing industry, these are one of the easiest ways to find out about new products.
I do some work as a graphic designer, and I like getting the emails from various sites that sell - and often give away - assets.
I could go on...
> When I order something I like getting the emails saying 'your package has been shipped...", and they typically come from a donotreply address.
I almost never want to reply to these. On the rare occasion when there’s a problem with the shipment, however, replying to this email feels like the right thing to do.
An emergency notice as well as a really good sale could be such a situation.
Both are good for your customers to know about, but you don’t want to annoy anyone because your email backlog became very long.
Many traditional businesses outsource most of their technical solutions and don't have the staff or the knowledge to deal with things like this.
All-in-all, it wasn't better— especially when Internet Explorer enters the discussion— but I always appreciate the opportunity to see these "old" news sites. I'm glad that they're archived in their original form, instead of the content being pulled from an old database into a new layout.
To make it double redundant, the reply-to address should be donotreply@donotreply.company.com.
Their first entry is "OK you hackers out there – you confounded us for a little while – but gamil is back!".
But it being for sale really surprises me; it doesn't like this would be a very attractive domain name to own for criminals.
https://web.archive.org/web/20080202045959/http://www.donotr...
News website comment areas are as bad or worse than YouTube comments; places inhabited by trolls and shitposters.