Can I set a noreply sender (for the "from" email)?

It may appear that setting a "noreply" return address (e.g. noreply@example.com as the from or reply-to address) may be a good idea. The reality is that this practice, although permitted, is in most cases not recommended. There are several reasons for that, which are discussed below.

UPDATED EMAIL ADDRESS

The sender may receive an auto-reply indicating that the e-mail address has changed and that the current address has been discontinued. This is relevant information that should be processed. Otherwise, you may lose the recipients. Keep in mind that an email address life of approximately 2.5 years.

MANAGING THE DIALOGUE

Receiving feedback, comments or requests must be perceived as an important value and not as a nuisance. For every customer who takes the time to write back to you, there are at least 20 others who thought the same thing, but did not take the time to do so.  Receiving that feedback can help you improve your products or services, optimize customer service procedures, understand how your brand is perceived, etc. Any interaction with your customers should be encouraged and not discouraged.

If the objective is to route certain customer communication through specific channels (e.g. call center, technical support forms, forums, etc.) we recommend the use of a real mailbox, but with an autoresponder that will automatically provide the customer with that information.

RESPECTING THE PRIVACY POLICY

The customer may be replying with a privacy-related preference (e.g. unsubscription request, modification of data, etc.) that if is not answered within a certain amount of time could make the sender non-compliant with consumer privacy protection regulations and/or company's own Privacy Policy.

MANAGING REPUTATION

A request for being unsubscribed sent to the sender by replying to a message - if unfulfilled - may result in a complaint the next time the same recipient receives a message from the company (i.e. the company is reported as a spammer). This negatively affect the sender's reputation and may affect the deliverability of future messages.

BUILDING CUSTOMER LOYALTY

Making it easy for customers to contact you often leads to higher satisfaction and customer loyalty.

CERTIFICATION

If you want to apply for sender certification through a whitelisting system like Return Path, one of the requirements is precisely that you manage the mail-from (or reply-to) address.

BOUNCES

The use of a noreply address as the mail-from or reply-to address does not affect bounces, as they are handled separately through information stored in the header of the message (Return-Path). So, there is no issue here.


HOW TO SET A NOREPLY ADDRESS

That said, there may be cases - especially with transactional messages - in which you may decide to use a noreply address. There are several ways to do so.

1. Use an address that does not exist and set it as the FROM address (not recommended)
2. Create a new mailbox (e.g. noreply@example.com), without managing it:
   1. Add an autoresponder that informs the sender that the mailbox is unmonitored
   2. Set the mailbox to delete messages automatically
3. Create a new mailbox (e.g. noreply@example.com), reviewing the messages that it receives, but without replying to most of them (e.g. you want to channel customers through different customer service / support channels).
   1. Add an autoresponder that informs the sender that the mailbox is unmonitored
   2. Regularly review the messages to see if there are any action items (e.g. particularly upset customer)
4. There maybe cases in which you wish to use a separate address for all replies, including bounces. You can do this by creating a special mailbox and requesting that it be set as the Return-Path for your entire console (this cannot be done at the list level).
   1. Provide email address, user name, password and POP server to Customer Service
   2. This console setting can only be changed once.
   3. This setting is reserved to customers that have purchased the Private Labeling option
   4. The mailbox box must be large enough and the mail server must be powerful enough to handle the potentially large amount of traffic deriving from managing bounces. Our system will retrieve and remove messages from the mailbox every 12 hours. No messages should otherwise be removed, in order not to compromise the handling of bounces.

Article ID: 286, Created On: 4/4/2011, Modified: 9/8/2011