Startups, Fix Your "From" Field
blog.jazzychad.net
blog.jazzychad.net
Once you figure out the right question, you can probably figure the answer out on your own.
Having said that, I must admit that the whole system is quite basic and not integrated as you'd expect for serious problem tracking (ideally we should use something that can keep track a problem through different channels, integrating web, mail and phone ticketing).
N.B. one problem is that unfortunately there are tons of people who cant read and dont understand that if you write from a "noreply@domain" account and write in the mail "THIS IS A SERVICE ACCOUNT PLEASE DO NOT REPLY TO THIS MAIL", you're actually supposed not to do it
if you set the from address as you suggest, but you dont have a fully integrated (mail/web etc..) ticketing system, you end up with a mess (part on the web part on the mail account).
You may get your whole email back, or just the start. The message may tell you what went wrong, it may not. It may tell you what email address you tried to send to that failed, that may be missing (some mail servers actually redact it).
shakes fist
Now, there are automated systems that exist outside of SMTP. For example, mail user agents generate vacation replies. Things like gmail and Exchange/Outlook blur the line between mail server and mail user agent. SMTP generated bounces are rarely useful for humans, but things like vacation messages are intended for humans. If there is a reply-to, that's assumed to be more of a human (a human who will at least read the response, bounce or otherwise) than the chances that the Sender (on a message with a Reply-to) is going to be a human.
So, if you're talking about bounces, I'd expect them to go to Sender. For vacation messages, I expect them to go to Reply-to. And of course, YMMV, even MMMV, based on the email topology of any specific organization. What counts as a bounce? What counts as a auto-reply about the availability-state of the recipient? Or the availability-state of the person/role collecting the recipient's email? Is that significantly different from a bounce? Can an automated system determine that? Should it?
(sidenote: Personally, I hate vacation messages. People think it provides an explanation for not immediately replying (anyone who thinks email is reliably immediate is an idiot), but all it does is show you care more how you don't respond when you're not around than when you are.)
If email is marked as spam, then IP address that sent that email is punished the most, not the email address itself.
Though in general, I agree that noreply is needlessly overused.
You have to remember that websites are used by "normal people": the same people who get punished by websites with ludicrous URLs or broken images and fall for schemes asking them for their money or password.
I recently took over a website that uses OSQA (an open-source stack overflow implementation). When users get answers or comments, they get an email from "JailbreakQA" <admin@jailbreakqa.com>.
These emails now go to me, and the people who respond to the emails invariably are trying to talk to the other user, not to me. In this case the conversations were already public, so it isn't a big deal, but the exact same thing would happen if a user got a comment from a friend on Facebook.
To be clear: these emails clearly state they are a notification, that they came from the website you are using, that to view the content you need to return to the website (providing a URL), and then separating the content from the other user in the body.
People still just reply. Now, maybe you think that should work: that the emails should go back to the website and to the conversation thread, but the reality is that bridging email will make that a horrible experience, as the way people speak in email, the formatting available, and the crazy intermix of MIME and the original content, causes chaos: imagine trying to safely and automatically convert an email back into a Facebook Wall reply ;P.
The reality is: these are notifications, not messages. Replying to them is nonsensical, and if we were going to extend the email protocol at all, it should be to make "this is not really an email" an explicit first class feature.
(As an aside: the count recovery emails sent by Cydia, my primary work, can be replied to. Almost all of the email I get in reply is an elaborate and sometimes quite time consuming version of "thanks, that worked!"... I am simply floored that people thank the automated system, but hey: at least they seen happy. ;P)
It doesn't make any intuitive sense that other people's replies to what you wrote are delivered to you by e-mail but you can't use e-mail to reply to them in turn. That's only half of a proper communication system. Give people a proper communication system, or give them none. If you only give them half, it is only natural that they will expect the other half to work. "Normal people" simply don't care whether SMTP is different from HTTP.
You say it'll be very difficult to make e-mail replies go back to the conversation thread on the web site, but Google Groups and Posterous group blogs have been doing that for years. Google even detects quotes in replies and hides them automatically; you could do the same in your forum software if you want. Support ticket systems of every web/vps/server host I've used also work with both e-mail and web. There are some kinks here and there, but integrating e-mail into a web conversation is a solved problem for the most part. There's no reason for e-mail notifications nowadays to be not reply-able, unless it's a one-off thing that clearly does not create any expectation of reply-ability.
[1]: http://blog.rassemblr.com/2011/01/user-registration-follow-u...
The startups that do this probably do it it because they get a ton of spam back.
I've lead a couple of projects now that have a few thousand users each. Nothing huge, all consumer-focused. I always make my notification emails be from jeff@{project}.com to give it that "human touch".
And I get the most ridiculous replies ever.
Not only do I get bounces (not a big deal) and vacation auto-responders (also not a big deal), but I also get messages from people that know they're getting someone's real email address.
People that want to talk. People that add you to their Google Talk or their "Fwd: FWD: FWD:" emails. People with insecure Hotmail passwords who start spamming you when their account gets hacked.
Obviously, some of the emails are very helpful - bug reports, feature requests, unsubscribes, etc... But some (I'm going to say most) are essentially just spam in the other direction.
I've moved my notification emails to be from "amy@{project}.com", a Mailgun inbox, and process it accordingly (e.g.: bounces get and unsub'd). It has a human name, but a mechanical backend. I strongly suggest it.
Thanks for sharing, the internet is a better place for it :P
On the other hand, if the From field only says "John" or "notification", I may open the email even if just for a second.
Also, note the branding value of having your company name in the from field. I receive emails from some sites that I no longer visit. Yet, just seeing their name day in and day out in my email makes me remember their name/brand.
I'm completely opposite. If I don't recognize the name in the From field and the company name isn't in the subject line, it gets categorized as SPAM.
At least with the cruft, bounces are just handed back to the app to deal with.
Thank you for this enlightening post.
Company Name: Check out this new feature
Enables people to easily find something by sorting alphabetically in case they cannot remember the company name in full. I do the same thing with downloadable files.
My Downloads folder is full of things like Summer-menu.pdf or menu.pdf when I'd rather have Celcius_Summer_menu.pdf.
We are sending ~300K+ emails per month. Reading bounces (and replies) is quite manageable. The worst offenders are ending up in spam folder anyway.
In the case of Django: DEFAULT_FROM_EMAIL = "My Company Name <somegirlname@mycompany.com>" is _all_ you need to do :)
"Here is an exmaple from a new startup whose website I joined yesterday:"