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Why do so many companies send out automated e-mails with a message telling you not to reply to the e-mail address? You get e-mails notifications for all sorts of things these days, but you're not allowed to respond via e-mail? C'mon.
It's like picking up the phone and the person on the other end says, "I can't hear you. Just listen to what I have to say. If you want to respond, go figure out how to contact me."
Almost any company that is sending out automated e-mails has to have people somewhere that handle e-mails. Technical. Billing. Account management. Something. Just setup the e-mail address to forward somewhere, to somebody. Don't tell me I can't perform one of the most basic functions of e-mail because you're too lazy or cheap to have it actually forward to a real person.
Talk about horrible communication skills.
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Most responses to my announcements at work have absolutely nothing to do with the announcement. It is like some neuron thought, "Oh! This is someone I can I ask about this totally unrelated topic to the announcement." Once I spent 9 hours of work time forwarding responses to others or asking what needed to be done with questionable inquires. I missed internal deadlines trying to keep up the good company image.
I think it's to deal with bounces. IIRC, there are headers that let you send bounces elsewhere, but stupid non-open-source mailing list software doesn't listen to it, so they come up with the dummy email address workaround.
This is something that drives me absolutely batty. Even large reputable companies shoot off these emails. Why the heck are they sending from an address that can't handle responses?
Not very friendly. It's like meeting a new person but not offering up your name. Cold.
Hmm...this is kinda related.
IBM now has a service that sorts all your mail into categories. All spam (which includes automated email) is automatically replied to.
I think it should reply 4 times instead of just once though.
I do hate automated anything though. Maybe it should just send a virus too...
That's one of the things that really bugs me about Basecamp, although I love the program for other reasons. I don't usually use it to communicate with my clients because it always puts that unfriendly "Do Not Respond" at the top of the email. It looks very scary to my less tech-savvy clients.
The issue, at least for my company, is the problem that email can cause. Email itself is not guaranteed to get where it needs to go. Between servers going down, virus blockers, spam blockers, and sheer numbers, it's actually quite easy to miss an email.
For my company, we moved to a in-house helpdesk system. There were several reasons for this:
These were the real motivations behind the system. We had other motivations, but these were the big three.
Now, how does this relate to email?
As I've already mentioned, email is not secure. And as someone above (Anonymous, 1st comment) already pointed out, people will reply to any email regardless, not change the subject line, and hope it gets to someone.
And this is a bad thing. Why? Because a lot of times, these people are sending us stuff about credit card transactions and what have you. I don't want to make it easier for my customers to make mistakes, I want to prevent it from happening.
Now, their is the realization that people still like and use email. It's efficient, and we still have a support email address clearly published. And people still use it. However, we do push people toward using the help desk system.
The next phase includes mixing the two together. So if a person sends an email to support, it will be captured by the help desk system, sorted, and entered into the correct account and placed in the same system. That way our customer support people have one location to go to to handle support, and customers can either use the help desk system or use the email address.
However, we would still require logging in to view certain responses for security reasons, and we still have to account for emails that are sent in from email addresses we don't have in the system, but those are easily addressed.
Anyways, the point of all this is that emailing, while it may be an easier solution, is not the best solution for both the customer and the company (obviously, with some companies, this differs, I primarily speak from my own experience with my company).
So yeah, hitting reply, and entering in your problem may seem like the best solution, but for the person on the other end, it's not. They have to decipher first of all if the email you are replying to has any relationship with the problem you are having (and again, in my experience, this is usually not the case), and then forward it off to the correct department. You also have to have an efficient way to handle this so that multiple people aren't sending off the same email to the same person. That recipient suddenly gets 10 of the same email in their inbox, and suddenly, they are not really all that happy. And then you run into the problems of viruses. Your machine may be secured, but guess what? Most aren't, and support email addresses get hit with a lot of viruses from customers. And while anti-virus programs can work, just as spam filters do, you also have the realistic expectation that it will block valid emails as well. And usually, it's those emails that are the most important (it's funny how that happens).
So their's actually a reason do-not-reply@domain.com is used as often as it is. Their are ways to improve on it (as I mentioned above, working out ways to incorporate support's email into the help desk software), but it's not an overnight fix.
Jason - Wow. Very good comments. I agree wholeheartedly with every detail you mentioned, but still disagree as a whole from a people first standpoint.
I completely understand the security implications (we're dealing with this on our current project), and I also know it's no joke to route that e-mail to the correct place whether automated or by hand.
The problem I see is that a business is using a method to communicate and then cutting off the conversation. In the case of security focused sites, unfortanately, I think forcing people to login is the only option for the time being.
However, there are many cases where these emails having nothing to do with security, it's simply a business that doesn't want me to communicate with them with the same ease that that they communicate with me.
Also, if people reply to that address, from a customer service standpoing, would you rather have an error e-mail sent back to them, or have somebody in the company somewhere actually receive the e-mail and do something with it. Or just have it feed back into the system. If people want to send their personal information, there's nothing you can do about that outside of education.
In the end, communication is two ways, and enabling that communication is the responsibility of the business. It's not necessarily easy or cheap, but there is a difference when someone does it right.
By the way, thanks for the effort in making such a strong explanation for why it is good.