Dealing with "do not reply" emails

We've always just left them and then clear them manually every 6 months or so whilst having a read of the ranty ones that were never going to get dealt with in the first place! You still get people sending emails as towhy no ones replied to their rant, to the donotreply email address.

I always assumed that do not reply email addresses are fake and don't go anywhere / bounce if someone replies to them?

Change your product to use per customer from addresses where the customer is in control of the mailbox. Up to them how to deal with it then.

Alternatively setup an auto reply saying this mailbox is not monitored.

We have a this mailbox is not monitored message. But we also take it in turns done on a rota to monitor the mailbox and respond if important.

We reject the emails when they are incoming at the server - so the user gets a bounce back. That may not be ideal but I think it is important that if a user replies they know it has not been received.  My preference would actually be not to use noreply@ email addresses.  I wonder if this is what your CEO is really asking for.  Why would the process not allow me to to send an email back which gets routed to either a general customer service team or better a person who is directly related to the message sent.  In some cases it might be that routing it to whoever is the "account owner" at your client would be best.

I always assumed that do not reply email addresses are fake and don’t go anywhere / bounce if someone replies to them?

Strangely, me too! /dev/null as some might put it.

Some good suggestions. The CEO prides himself on our customer service so sees this as some sort of failing on our behalf because users may not get an appropriate response (whether from us or their own company).

For sure, though, we have a VERY disparate cohort of users and I'm equally sure the half of them probably do want to get the response and half of them don't want to have to deal with other users ranting at them. So, we'd need to support some config options and it would have to be implemented in quite a few different places...and devs are telling me this is multiple days worth of work.🤷

I do like the idea of  a "This mail box is not monitored" bounce back...and it seems a lot quicker to implement...

My preference would actually be not to use noreply@ email addresses. I wonder if this is what your CEO is really asking for. Why would the process not allow me to to send an email back which gets routed to either a general customer service team or better a person who is directly related to the message sent.

This - it seems silly to have an email coming from 'donotreply@company.com' which then says something like "This is an automated email to tell you that Thing has happened. If you have any queries please contact support@company.com".... When you could just set the reply-to address to support@company in the first place?

Folk of a certain vintage might remember the transition from 'BMX Action Bike' to 'RAD magazine' and the contribution of Nick Philip to their aesthetic

One of the things Nick went on to do was create an art installation of angry replies to spam emails - spammers used to use 'nowhere.com' as the reply address - so Nick registered the domain

Then we had an internet installation called “nowhere.com” which is a collaboration piece I did with a programmer named Nic Harteau, assisted by Jeff Taylor.
That was the domain nowhere.com, which is used by spamers who use the internet to circulate the junk mail to trying sell stuff to people in the internet. Hundreds of spamers use nowhere.com to disguize the domain.

Thousands of emails everyday going through nowhere.com. The most of it spam and then they replys to spamer… angry people replying back saying “don’t **** spam me!!”
Nowhere is often not in the email browsers and the reply form. Nowhere.com is just the default. If you don’t put any email address in, you will be like someone@nowhere.com or noone@nowhere.com.

So what we did was we had a computer that we got from day to night internet and we bounce to mails to this computer. We distributed the mail to 12 fax moters and then connected those to 12 fax machines. So we had wall longs about 35 feet with faxes, just printing out all these mails. And we had trash cans on the bottom collecting all the mail.

Not much for advice but when I was doing an apprenticeship to leave graphic design and head into an IT career I was doing it at a scuba diving shop with a big ecommerce platform, at one point my boss was doing a lot of work with contacts in Italy, I'm also sure he was likely undiagnosed dyslexic as for publications or web postings he would write them in word to check for spelling mistakes before copying and pasting to the web.

One day he came over to me annoyed about how the new spam filter I'd put in place wasn't working properly because he kept getting spam emails from the same guy related to the work he was doing expanding contacts and contracts in Italy, no matter how many times he'd marked him as spam or blocked them they still kept coming.

So I went over to take a look and seen on screen an example which was something like "donotreply@website.com"
I said "Don't reply? those are all from different senders, I'll adjust the spam threshold." he glanced at the screen, glanced back at me, looked at the screen again and turned bright red and said "Oh.. Ffs.. I thought this bloke's name was Don Treply and he wouldn't stop emailing me no matter how many times I tried to block him"

But if the email says Do Not Reply and the original message them seems to initiate a reply from a user or customer.

Is there not a problem with the original email content !?

Lazy coding, and easy mock the replying customer.