This does not help, as while the private information sent to the user is missing, the private information sent from the user will still be there: they will simply now send complaints to the people who provide their email client that it didn't work.
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)
You're talking about the same kind of "normal people" who will reply to noreply@ anyway and complain that the company doesn't respond. In that case, how does it help anyone if you keep using a noreply@ address, whether for privacy or for any other reason? If "people still just reply", maybe the right thing to do is to make those replies actually work, instead of trying to restrain normal people's normal behavior.
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.
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)