I have long wondered why emails are sent by companies from noreply, with no custom reply field. The email typically warns you not to reply to this email but if you do want to contact them, them send an email to <this> place.

I have to strongly question the competence of anyone using this system. They have sent you an email, typically for a specific purpose, often including things like transaction ids. Your next step if you want to contact them is to either begin a whole new email chain, or fill out a form, enter into a ticket system or possibly even call them.

All of that could be avoided by filling the reply field with a transaction unique address. Or alternatively, they could use a common reply address and fill the subject line with a unique id.

Why do you think so many companies do this with electronic business?

I have long wondered why emails are sent by companies from noreply, with no custom reply field. The email typically warns you not to reply to this email but if you do want to contact them, them send an email to <this> place.

I have to strongly question the competence of anyone using this system. They have sent you an email, typically for a specific purpose, often including things like transaction ids. Your next step if you want to contact them is to either begin a whole new email chain, or fill out a form, enter into a ticket system or possibly even call them.

All of that could be avoided by filling the reply field with a transaction unique address. Or alternatively, they could use a common reply address and fill the subject line with a unique id.

Why do you think so many companies do this with electronic business?

it most likely weeds out a ton of unwarranted "thanks" responses, and such. and also ensures that the email address itself isn't auto-added to some chain emails, since the email would have to be parsed to get the actual real contact address.

BladeOfWrath mentioned that each user would get messages sent from a unique email address.

If I already gave them my email and name, and my name is "CaveJohnson", they might send me emails at my address (CaveJohnson@gmail.com).

But they might send it from a custom email "cave.johnson@support.mybusiness.com", and all my interactions with that company could go through that email.

If that email starts getting spammed, they can just scrap that one email address. Or, they can auto-block all incoming email to that email address that doesn't come from CaveJohnson@gmail.com.

You can easily create Email from a non existent address using PHP, JavaScript ( indirectly ), or any number of web applications.

I translate "noreply" as a code generated Email.

Thanks to the fact that emails have not only recipients but also subject lines, there's not even a need for a customized sender address and MTA hacks.

With a UUID in the subject line (presumably terminated with some marker characters), it's trivial to sort out valid and invalid emails and link each email with a user and/or transaction, no need to do anything needlessly complicated involving fake addresses. All replies can go to the same receiver.

But of course, what if you really don't want replies, because you give a fuck what your customer has to say, and dealing with the replies that you're not interested in costs time and money. In that case, you give them a no-reply address and in case they still want to contact you, you make them enter data manually into a deliberately complicated form, after which they're given an outrageous "service" telephone number. You know, if you have to pay 12cents per minute for a phone call that is normally free, this is what you call "service". Especially if you have to listen to music for 15 minutes first, only to be redirected to some dude in a callcenter who doesn't speak your language.

The only semi-legitimate reason I could see for this is to filter out automated responses when sending emails to very large user lists. Prior to working at Microsoft I wouldn't have seen this problem, but it's not uncommon for me to get 10% or higher auto-responder replies when sending emails out to groups over 20. Internal lists are one thing, but that should never be done for any B2C emails that get sent out.