> 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.
I think it depends a little on the context. I work in the public sector for instance, setting up a filter for our mail is something that, well, no one has successfully done yet. It’s not for lack of trying, we’ve had (and will continue to have) corporations with both big tech, startups and universities until we get something that’s actually better than outlook rules and a lot of manual sorting.
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.
I've seen a big international bank internal network shut down because someone added a group mail of +- 10 000 people to a thread with jokes.
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.
> I've seen a big international bank internal network shut down because someone added a group mail of +- 10 000 people to a thread with jokes.
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.
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").
I believe it's to make it a bit more difficult to get the replies. If someone REALLY wants to reply, they can spend the extra 1-2 minutes to go to the company's website and either write to them via their Contact Form(s), or find their "info/sales/privacy/etc@company.com email, and FW the original+comment to that new address.
I agree. I personally feel that if you're either unwilling or unable to handle the responses you might receive, then you shouldn't send the email in the first place.
Responses generally consist of a large amount of out of office messages, various undeliverable and error messages from remote mail servers, and the occasional auto-response which triggers your own auto-response, which triggers theirs which ends up in a mail loop that takes down email for your whole company.
Many traditional businesses outsource most of their technical solutions and don't have the staff or the knowledge to deal with things like this.
I respectfully disagree with that position as a general rule. The wide variety of reasons for emails is more nuanced. Reality is more than all or nothing, 0 or 1.
Can you elaborate?
I'm struggling to find a valid example of a one way mail stream from company to customers where all customers will never want to reply yet still want to get these mails.
It's impossible to say that "all people will never want to do X", as there are some strange people out there. However, there are many emails that I want that I would never want to reply to.
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.
> 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.
I’m terribly sad bottomless.com isn’t a startup devoted to serving the vast market of users who only want to order the top half of a bikini set. Or perhaps particularly odd nudists.
Off topic: after a long day including a report of some high-level client seeing rendering issues in an old version of Internet Explorer, the fixed-width layout of old news sites seems so simple in comparison. Coming across this article was a breath of… well, certainly not "fresh" air, but it was at least bittersweet. I noticed that my browser window resized instantly, with zero lag, and nothing got hot and no fans spun.
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.
Makes me wonder how news websites archive their articles. Do they snapshot the HTML/CSS/JS, store it for every article and serve it as static sites? Do they have templating systems where they reconstruct the look of the old sites? Or do they just never put old systems out of production? (Which would be scary.)
TBH, I’ve never seen the examples they feature in the article. It’s always donotreply@company.com, not company@donotreply.com but I can definitely see self-professed “web development experts” writing up a script not understanding how bounce receipts and message envelopes work.
I see a lot of emails from "donotreply", but never pay any attention whether it's a user name or domain name. I have no doubt that many of them are domain names.
To make it double redundant, the reply-to address should be donotreply@donotreply.company.com.
The owner of "gamil.com" must get so much email. I have mistyped that domain so many times (and corrected myself), but whoever owns that domain has a massive amount of power based solely on all the unintended emails he receives. Imagine all the bank account password resets, confidential information, and personal information that are accidentally sent to "gamil" addresses instead of "gmail". If I were a state-sponsored hacker, I'd be trying to take control of as many typo domains as possible and hoovering up all the mistaken emails and mining them for valuable information.
gamil.com is such a weird place. Gamil Design appears to be a legitimate business with a crappy site, but you just know how coveted the domain must be by bad actors.
Their first entry is "OK you hackers out there – you confounded us for a little while – but gamil is back!".
Registering donotreply.com sounds like the kind of shenanigans Chet Faliszek (of Old Man Murray, Portal of Evil, and Portal (video game) fame) would get up to.
I miss the time all major news websites had a comment section directly below the main content. It's an interesting parallel to the whole idea of the companies ignoring customer feedback by limiting their communication channels discussed in the article.
Did you ever read these comments? There was almost no value added by allowing people to shout into the wind and have it appear on your website. Or worse, it detracted from the quality of original content.
News website comment areas are as bad or worse than YouTube comments; places inhabited by trolls and shitposters.
It’s crazy for companies to discourage replies and force customers to find a different channel when the email itself has all relevant context.