How can you make a Noreply email?

[Infrasonic]

I find that more than 50% of "noreply" addresses do actually go somewhere and get a reply.

Which bit of the "noreply" address makes you feel you want to, er, reply to it?

Scott.

Well, a few times I've replied to Noreply emails with questions I have, and have received answers. So they must be read.

Personally I find them rude and irritating. During meetings, I don't think my boss would be too happy if I told him something, then clamped my hands over my ears, muttering "You can't reply to that!"

.... though maybe worth a try.

Steve

How about if your boss rang you up or emailed your personal address whilst you were on holiday or out of office hours with a non urgent query?...
Noreply lets you know not to reply to that address as is isn't appropriate in relation to the information being sent in the email.

If it's being sent from a dept. that actually has a customer service facing remit then that is an abuse of no replies purpose IMHO, and that does annoy me, intensely. It's basically saying we don't give a s***. The response to that should be to take your business elsewhere until they get the message.

[Lanark]

The reason noreply exists at all is that when bulk emailing thousands of customers, there will inevitably be lots of bounced/invalid replies and lots of out-of-office auto replies.
That makes it difficult but not impossible to find and respond to genuine emails.

The majority of marketing people have realised that the customer who replies to a noreply is probably a pissed off frustrated customer that is on the verge of becoming an ex-customer. So it is easy pickings to respond to those emails and get them back on side.

[Slarti]

Looking through those emails I have to hand at the moment, the noreply@ ones are things like "Your statement is now available to view online" or newsletters with a number of links to the full stories in the body of the message plus those where they want you to do things through their website, because email is not secure.

Slarti

[Infrasonic]

Looking through those emails I have to hand at the moment, the noreply@ ones are things like "Your statement is now available to view online" or newsletters with a number of links to the full stories in the body of the message plus those where they want you to do things through their website, because email is not secure.

Slarti

Likewise.

I've noticed when researching previously that often those sort of noreply emails don't go through any DMARC end to end validation either, so they are obviously differentiating between DMARC 'trusted sender' essential 'your account details/sensitive information contained within', and more general 'we don't care' email traffic. Same organisations, different SMTP server addresses.
Possibly to be ISO or GDPR compliant for the DMARC sent stuff.

[Lanark]

Oh one other thing to add - often you email a noreply and get some auto-response along the lines of "this email addresss isn't monitored please phone our hotline" or whatever.

But you reply to that email and then you get a real response.

[superFoolish]

Many companies will use third parties for marketing or other services (even if the emails appear to come from the parent company), so I think the use of noreply is legitimate, although somewhat abused.

In which case, they should use a service reply email address for the company on whose behalf they are sending the email; this is not difficult to configure.

Furthermore, the reply email address should be unique, so that the company receiving the email knows that the sender is responding to a specific email campaign. This is industry standard stuff; one of the measures of the success of an email campaign would be to know how many people replied to the email (even if you don't want them to reply). Why? Because if they are replying, it indicates that there is a service issue that you can improve.

1) The recipient didn't understand that they weren't supposed to reply. Why? Badly designed email?
2) If they do reply, how can you service their query or sell them whatever it is they might want to buy? Lost opportunity.

Basically, there is no excuse, other than crappy customer service policies.

Whilst I am ranting, there is no excuse for "It may take 7 days to process your unsubscribe request"; computers can communicate with each other much faster than that, so connect them, (using an agency with a decent email API, if required). It's not 1985.

Note: Ire is not directed at participants in this discussion, unless they send noreply@ emails to their customers. Don't do it!

[UncleEbenezer]

It's not 1985.

1985? You'd've been running a listserv. Developed by engineers who knew what they were doing, and working much better than most of what's come since.

The only thing that would be likely to take longer back then was delivery in the first place. That was the era when many connections were intermittent, and the default five days before a queued mail would give up trying and bounce back actually meant something.