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Comment by sp332 | Hacker News Reader

Good points in here, but I disagree about using a person's name as the From address. If I'm getting an email from Notion, I want it to show up as "From: Notion" in my inbox, not "From: Ivan". I have several companies that do this and I never know who the email is from, which adds some cognitive friction I don't need when triaging my inbox. You can put your name in the subject line if you want.

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Right. Further to this, I consider it spammy when the same organisation uses a range of different From addresses in its mailings. I have unsubscribed from lists for this triage-hostile behaviour.

I see it as the exact opposite. If organization sends me marketing from marketing@ and order details from orders@, I easily have a way to quickly delete or classify marketing@ as spam. I can't do that if they send everything from the same email.

Yeah, but what if they send you marketing from Ivan, and also Sara and John?

    from:(organization) -from:(orders@organization)

Select all, mark as spam, delete.

I personally strongly agree, but I want to point out that HN is not a remotely representative sample of email users.

Study marketing a bit, and you'll find loads of things that email power users loathe that still get an overall very positive response from the general public.

Know your userbase. Cater to them, not some random people on the internet with strong opinions.

By "positive response", are you saying that human "from" names yield a higher click-through rate?

Yes, it does. It is widely thought to be true and certainly matches my experience at statistical significance.

Keep in mind the adage "you get what you measure". If you optimize for CTR, you are not necessarily optimizing for user satisfaction/loyalty.

Case in point: Netflix's auto-play feature used to drive me bonkers, so much that I would try other streaming services first. How could they think this feature was a good idea? The only plausible explanation I've heard is that they were optimizing for user engagement. Users click around more to prevent the video from auto playing.

You are critiquing your own question, which I was answering directly.

What I said also applies to any other metric, including (for example) income generation.

That, and feedback that they genuinely enjoyed things that the rest of us hate.

Microsoft heard from hundreds of users who were heartbroken when Clippy was removed from Microsoft Word.

Especially with all the phishing emails going around.

This for be too: a personal name that I don't recognise is not unlikely to get your message discussed and deleted as junk if I'm scanning my mail in a rush. That and emoji in the subject line (which I assume is designed to make you stand out, but to me grates more then ALL CAPS).

But I'm a grumpy old techie, how I see such things is going to differ to the general populous, so maybe a technique that puts me off gets more positive attention from more then enough others that losing me is worth it.

this is an interesting point. I think the email address matters if you expect people to answer. In the superhuman example, I know the CEO isn't sending me those emails, but I'm more likely to reply if I have a question. Palabra's onboarding emails come from my personal email address and many people reply with questions directly to me, which really helped us get immediate feedback

Since the article is specifically about onboarding, it might not be that bad. But chances are, I'm going to forget your name about 5 minutes after this introduction, so getting future emails with your name will just confuse me.

I despise people names, takes me forever to figure out who it is. I feel tricked into spending time reading into the email to figure it out.

This wouldn't be so bad if popular UIs like gmail weren't so opposed to displaying email addresses in an email client. In many places they display exclusively the name. It's very confusing, especially if the people you email have strange names for their contacts, which then get displayed in your client.

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