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Comment by pmlnr | Hacker News Reader

I have a Gmail nightmare story from a couple of years ago.

The company I work for was sending confirmation emails doing everything properly: separate IP range mx boxes, warmed up, DMARC, SPF, DKIM, all the bells and whistles. Nothing else was allowed to go through them.

Suddenly people weren't getting those confirmation letters. It turned out that soon after Gmail introduced the "Promotions" tab, a silent, new feature was added: anything from noreply@ was put in there.

We tried going through the official channels - once we got to the end of the tunnel, it told us "we'll get back to you in 2 weeks". That's when we started digging into internal google connections across the company, and thank god, we found someone who know someone, and in was sorted within a couple of hours. (It might have helped that the company spends a lot of money on google ads.)

Gmail is lovely.

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You should never have been sending mail from noreply@ in the first place. Every message needs to be send from a real mailbox that can receive a reply that will be read by a person. If the message isn’t important enough for that, then it is spam and Gmail was doing the correct thing with it.

I don't believe your approach is correct, for multiple reasons.

There are valid scenarios for one way communication; those emails are only verifications of transaction that can't be simply altered via responding to a mail.

Email has the notion of Reply-to header, although this case, that was not populated.

Making a decision solely noreply@ is why the life of Mr. Null is quite hard.[^1]

No, gmail is not right about this.

[^1] https://www.wired.com/2015/11/null/

It doesn't matter if the transaction can't be altered if something went wrong. The customer can still have a complaint to register, like "I am not your customer, please stop sending me his receipts".

I have to disagree with you. If you're sending a message to somebody, no matter what the medium, it's the right thing to do to give them a way to respond. Emails are a two-party transaction, not a facility for unidirectional spam.

A valid return address is not the only way to respond. There could be a link to a support page in the mail, a telephone number or even a mailto: link.

There could be, but frequently is not.

gsuite-noreply@google.com sends me invoices.

What's your point?

You can respond by looking up the company and contacting them...

Sorry, this ship sailed about 25 years ago. These days, emails are primarily a facility for notifications and other unidirectional messaging. Some of it is not spam. A lot of it is. I delete rough 20 emails every morning, unread.

Postcards have a long history of disagreement with you.

You generally don't receive postcards from people you don't know how to get in touch with.

Do you even feel this way about emails used for a password-reset transaction?

Absolutely. Why wouldn't I? Let's say I didn't request it. Wouldn't you want a way to reach out to support to let them know that someone might be trying to get into your account?

If you want your support staff responding to user's auto-responders, newsletters and spam, then use support@, but if you want your staff to get work done, then you use a noreply@ and have your support requests come in some other way.

You seem adamant that users and their ISPs should deal with the spam problem without any speed bumps for you, but unwilling to accept the equal spam problem of sifting legitimate support problems from other replies.

I understand the frustration of seeing our simple and low effort mechanisms decay over the past 30 years. But I also appreciate that there might just be a need for a more symmetric social contract for engaging in the use of communications systems and other common infrastructure.

I don't consider receipts and other noreply content from the places I frequent to be spam. I want those messages. If my ISP or service provider auto-spammed them I would be very annoyed. Just because I want their receipts doesn't mean I expect to get a live human when I reply. I'll just call them or email their support line.

Hmm, I didn't mean that all notifications are spam.

But, the task recipients face for sifting and sorting their inbox into different buckets is essentially the same faced by a notification sender who accepts feedback instead of hiding behind a no-reply address. Lacking real message authentication and authorization tools, we have to look at a mixture of content and metadata patterns to try to sort it out.

In this every gray world, I can imagine reciprocity being a useful measure...

Is that a 'should' as in best practice, or a 'should' in terms of a RFC for a mailing standard?

The reason I ask is because I'm pretty sure lot's of sites (invoices/receipts/newsletters) send out stuff via a noreply intentionally.

>a silent, new feature was added: anything from noreply@ was put in there.

This is my frustration with Google and their suddenly deciding this is how things should be done. For instance I use my camera to capture receipts, QR codes I may want later and a dozen other things. Google is of the opinion this wastes space so I get regular "Clear up the clutter!" cards. One man's clutter is another man's system of record for important stuff. Stop imposing your opinion on how I should use your product, Google.

I believe you can turn those off.

Ah after some more googling it looks like that's controlled by the "suggested archive" option under google photos. I'll try it and see.

Holy shit, Google editorializes the content of your own personal photos? I'm obviously way out the loop with my gapps-less LineageOS phone, because the Overton window has clearly moved a long way.

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