I don't think noreply is about not wanting people to respond to your messages. It is rather a solution for all the garbage you get back when sending out email to thousands of people. You will get many many mailer deamon mails for people who typed their addresses wrong or whose mailbox is full (yes, there are still webhosts that have a 20 MB limit apparently). Filtering all this stuff takes lots of effort and seems li…
Stop Using noreply
31–36 of 36 posts
Re: Stop Using noreply
#32I don't think noreply is about not wanting people to respond to your messages. It is rather a solution for all the garbage you get back when sending out email to thousands of people. You will get many many mailer deamon mails for people who typed their addresses wrong or whose mailbox is full (yes, there are still webhosts that have a 20 MB limit apparently). Filtering all this stuff takes lots of effort and seems li…
You can also use the Reply-To header to achieve the same result.
Re: Stop Using noreply
#33"I replied and we shared a short conversation where I learned the meaning behind the name Quibb. Fun. :) And she does this for all new users. Bravo, Sandi! As Sandi has demonstrated, the Internet doesn’t have to be faceless. We need to stop communicating with robots." This idea doesn't scale very well. If you're a struggling little company that's trying to hold on to a handful of users (Quibb is currently "invite-onl…
I'm opening up my own site to the beta list in 10 days (shameless plug: https://writeapp.me) and I thought about noreply and I came up with this: Some emails are meant to or can reasonably be expected to generate feedback. Replies to those will be handled swiftly and efficiently. Others, like transactional emails the app generates warrant no reply. Changed your password? Okay, we'll click the link to reset it or ignore this email to keep it the same. Replies to such emails will be accepted but they'll be directed to a very low priority inbox.
The problem is that when you have X types of emails and X inboxes, accepting replies on all of them is an organization nightmare. There's a lot to be said for setting proper expectations. If you make sure to direct users to the appropriate channels from day 1 then you don't have to worry about support requests coming from marketing emails or transactional notification emails. Letting users reply to all emails and giving them personal attention no matter what they replied to from day 1 sets the expectation that they'll have that forever and are then entitled to it. There's a reason noreply is used. It's not because someone was an asshole and didn't want to interact with users. It was because its impractical at a certain point.
By all means make it a priority to get feedback and interact with users but just be careful and don't be short sighted about it.
The example in the post is actually a bad example. The author is saying not to use noreply and references an email that is in no way similar to any kind of noreply email youd normally get. He got an email from a founder. The context was personal. Why in the world would that ever come from a noreply address? The example would be far more compelling (yet still take a position I disagree with) if he had gotten a transactional email or a marketing email that he replied to. But he didn't. He got a personal email because of something he said online that was noticed by someone at the startup. Apples and oranges.
The post's point should have been simply to encourage startups to engage more with users and make them feel special. This post seems to have little to do with noreply email addresse at all. By taking a story about startups engaging with users and turning it into an anti-noreply article the real message is buried and becomes disagreeable.
Re: Stop Using noreply
#34"I replied and we shared a short conversation where I learned the meaning behind the name Quibb. Fun. :) And she does this for all new users. Bravo, Sandi! As Sandi has demonstrated, the Internet doesn’t have to be faceless. We need to stop communicating with robots." This idea doesn't scale very well. If you're a struggling little company that's trying to hold on to a handful of users (Quibb is currently "invite-onl…
I think it's possible to scale a personal approach to support. Maybe, as Quibb grows, Sandi doesn't actually manually send each message. Maybe she sets up an autoresponder with a default welcome message. However, it's still possible to send automated messages in a personal way. Instead of the email coming from noreply@quibb.com, or even support@quibb.com (better), maybe Sandi continues to have the welcome emails sent…
Re: Stop Using noreply
#35I don't think noreply is about not wanting people to respond to your messages. It is rather a solution for all the garbage you get back when sending out email to thousands of people. You will get many many mailer deamon mails for people who typed their addresses wrong or whose mailbox is full (yes, there are still webhosts that have a 20 MB limit apparently). Filtering all this stuff takes lots of effort and seems li…
Bounces should go to the "envelope from address", which is different than the from address in the actual email. The way I've set this up before had the envelope from address be "bounce-$user_id@companydomain.com" so that we could identify bad addresses, but any replies from humans go to someone directly. You can also use the Reply-To header to achieve the same result.
Re: Stop Using noreply
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it's possible to scale a personal approach to support. Maybe, as Quibb grows, Sandi doesn't actually manually send each message. Maybe she sets up an autoresponder with a default welcome message. However, it's still possible to send automated messages in a personal way. Instead of the email coming from noreply@quibb.com, or even support@quibb.com (better), maybe Sandi continues to have the welcome emails sent…
What you're describing and what the author describes isn't noreply email. A noreply message is a one-way communication that doesn't warrant a response and if it gets one will be sent to a low priority inbox. I'm 100% for your idea but what I take exception to is the idea that noreply emails are somehow wrong or bad. They're not. They're quite useful. This is where scale comes in. At a certain point you just can't acc…
Customers want to feel as though there's a real person they can contact directly. They don't want to feel as though they'll simply be shunted endlessly from department from department. My opinion is that the customer shouldn't need to learn how your company is structured simply to make a one-off complaint or ask a question. The onus should be on the company to receive the support query and then pass it along to somebody who can answer it.
I'm aware this a less obviously scaleable approach to support. For some companies, it's not really tenable. In many cases, the value of a single customer may be so low that providing good support isn't worth it... it may be more valuable to simply ignore that customer until they leave. But for companies in which every customer is valuable, or could be valuable (Mailchimp, for example, or Zendesk), this kind of "inefficient" customer-centric support makes sense.