I disagree with the logical premise of this article, at least for our specific case (social networking app sending notifications about activity). We most certainly don't want replies. The sender of the emails is not us, our company, but the application itself. When a calendar app on your smartphone reminds you of a meeting, there's no "Reply" button because having one simply doesn't make sense.
The fact that email is a system where it's implied that anything is replyable is unfortunate. Email is currently the best option for sending out notifications on the Internet, since most people don't know about feeds or how to use them. If there were a better, equally established technology for one-way notifications, we would use it. (We use SMS messaging, too, but only when it makes sense, since it's pretty invasive.)
Anyway, we did try to kill the no-reply behaviour at one point. Sounded good on paper, but it was impossible to execute in practice. Some issues, off the top of my head:
* We got a ton of vacation autoresponses, in all sorts of languages and all sorts of phrasings. It would be too time-consuming to set up rules to deal with all of the variations.
* We got an onslaught of replies accusing us of spamming them. These were users of our site, remember; a lot of sign up to an app and then promptly forget that they were now members. They never read the actual email, which has a very visible footer explaining how to disable notifications.
* A lot of confused users replied to the emails, either to thank us for the notification (not useful), or intended as a reply to a specific user, such as in the case of "new comment" notifications.
Sure, in some cases (like comment follow-ups) we could automatically process the rely. However, I'm really skeptical about our ability to handle email formatting well, though. Things like quoting, HTML, "On June 12th, John Doe wrote:" headers (which often are not in English) and signatures must be stripped, and I could not find an existing library that would do this reliably.
Maybe if you are Facebook or Google you can spend the necessary manpower to deal with the technical challenges, but we can't; our company is small enough that we can't even afford the resources necessary to screen replies manually.
The fact that email is a system where it's implied that anything is replyable is unfortunate. Email is currently the best option for sending out notifications on the Internet, since most people don't know about feeds or how to use them. If there were a better, equally established technology for one-way notifications, we would use it. (We use SMS messaging, too, but only when it makes sense, since it's pretty invasive.)
Anyway, we did try to kill the no-reply behaviour at one point. Sounded good on paper, but it was impossible to execute in practice. Some issues, off the top of my head:
* We got a ton of vacation autoresponses, in all sorts of languages and all sorts of phrasings. It would be too time-consuming to set up rules to deal with all of the variations.
* We got an onslaught of replies accusing us of spamming them. These were users of our site, remember; a lot of sign up to an app and then promptly forget that they were now members. They never read the actual email, which has a very visible footer explaining how to disable notifications.
* A lot of confused users replied to the emails, either to thank us for the notification (not useful), or intended as a reply to a specific user, such as in the case of "new comment" notifications.
Sure, in some cases (like comment follow-ups) we could automatically process the rely. However, I'm really skeptical about our ability to handle email formatting well, though. Things like quoting, HTML, "On June 12th, John Doe wrote:" headers (which often are not in English) and signatures must be stripped, and I could not find an existing library that would do this reliably.
Maybe if you are Facebook or Google you can spend the necessary manpower to deal with the technical challenges, but we can't; our company is small enough that we can't even afford the resources necessary to screen replies manually.