I used to not pay a lot of attention when I got emails that had noreply@soullesscorporation.com as the reply address. It made a certain amount of sense: you’re sending out a big mass emailing; you don’t want all the replies crashing into your inbox. It makes sense, until it doesn’t.
For me, it stopped making sense when I got an announcement from one of my sons’ school principals. You know, with the obligatory “and remember, my door is always open and we value your feedback” boilerplate. Since the email was announcing a particularly idiotic and hazardous policy (a column for another day, perhaps) I thought that my valued feedback was probably pretty important since the policy directly impacted my son’s health and safety and I was a recognized and credentialed expert in the relevant discipline.
I composed a careful, considered, and measured reply to the email. I took time to be extra thoughtful. I gave the benefit of the doubt: the policy sounded idiotic to me, but perhaps they somehow made the policy without access to the data which showed it to be dangerously flawed. Then I hit Send. And got a bounce message.
Yes, the email, signed by the school principal, which talked about her open door policy and eagerness to receive feedback, the school principal’s email had the reply-to header set to noreply@sanjuan.edu.
I was irritated. I found the principal’s email address on the school web site (the design of which made it pretty clear that my opinion wasn’t particularly sought after nor valued) and sent a copy of my previous email, along with questioning why the email from my son’s school principal was sent with a “noreply” return address.
The principal did reply, though the bulk of her reply was “policy is policy” and she wasn’t going to go against policy even if that policy put the safety of students at risk. As to the noreply@sanjuan.edu return address, the principal flatly stated that it was “how IT does things” and she had no choice in the matter.
So I called the district’s IT department.
Yeah. They claimed that not only can mailing-list senders decide what reply-to address to use, the default is not “noreply” but rather it’s the sender’s email. They have to specifically opt to use “noreply” if that is their preference. So was my son’s school principal lying to my face, or just the district IT department? And does it really matter?
As it happened, the very next day the state government overrode the district’s idiocy and forced them to adopt a policy that didn’t put children’s lives and families at risk.
In the years to come, I would learn that the district will “value parents’ opinions” only when such valuing doesn’t inconvenience them and, more emphatically, only when it doesn’t result in a loss of revenue. I guess, at the time, I was naïve enough to find that surprising.
After that, I reflected more generally on the whole notion of a “noreply@” email address. Is it ever justified? Doesn’t it always say “we simply don’t care?” I found, the more I thought about it, that anyone using a “noreply@” return address has suspect motives.
“But, twoprops, I don’t want ten thousand people yelling at me in my inbox!!” So, perhaps, you might reconsider sending the email that’s going to anger ten thousand people so much that you have to hide behind a “noreply@” address.
“I’m just the poor clerical or IT worker who sends out the bulk emails.” That’s what the “reply-to header” is actually for. You can send the email, but make sure that the replies go to the person responsible and who needs to hear the feedback that their message engenders.
I can, at a first approximation, come up with several reasonable-sounding scenarios where a “noreply@” return address might make sense, but every single one of them falls apart with additional scrutiny.
The bottom line is that a noreply return address is arrogant. Period.
—2p
PS. My networks’ spam filters are also more likely to consider a message junk mail if it has a noreply@ reply address.