[BillinghamJ]

That's highly disingenuous. Unless you've been spamming your users, it's typical that less than 1% of emails are automated responses. These can be deleted/skipped very quickly.

In my company's case, it's more like 0.1%, but perhaps some are higher.

[ChristianBundy]

Not to mention how easy it is to filter auto-replies. If you receive an office with the strong "out of the office" or "vacation" within ten seconds of sending the email, you can be reasonably sure that it's an automated reply.

[csydas]

It's not always this though - I worked support in the past and have seen the annoyingness that two auto-reply systems from different ticketing systems can become. Customer emails us and they get our auto response, which triggers an auto response from their system, which triggers the pre-First Time Response response from ours, which triggers a new ticket from them since the pre-First Time Response response doesn't pull the ticket number from their system's subject line, which in turn triggers another response from this, all the while we're getting spammed with update emails and the case log is bogged down with non-sense. This repeats several times until one side intervenes to ensure their system's automated rules don't catch the support emails for this case.

I understand why we have the no-reply and auto-reply emails, and it makes a lot of sense in many ways, but there's also a very large blind spot where two systems don't realize they're talking to each other and not to humans; the system does exactly what it should be, it's just not what we want it to be doing.

[BillinghamJ]

The easiest solution to this is to respond with automated emails, but instead only when a human decides it's appropriate.

We send from "auto@", but have a reply-to of "support@" or something more specific depending on the exact case. This does seem to help a little bit with slightly reducing non-human emails.

[j_s]

This is a good point. I wonder if the difference between 'from' and 'reply to' mentioned elsewhere covers this.

[ci5er]

Except in western Europe towards the end of July. It's closer to 85%. Brutal.

[hinkley]

If all of your customers are on vacation, why are you still emailing them?

[drdeadringer]

How do you know your customers are on vacation prior to the first auto response?

[briandear]

If they are in Europe, it’s useless trying to do anything the last week of July through August. France, for example, pretty much shuts down. I have heard of VC negotiations just stopping practically midsentence August 1 and magically resuming September 1. Apparently France doesn’t understand that it is possible for people to take vacations in any month other than August. They seem to thrive on tourist destinations being absurdly crowded while in June, many destinations are nearly ghost towns. (I live in Provence and have a tiny hotel there so I see it up close and personal every year.)

[drdeadringer]

I had forgotten (socially, legally) "mandated" vacation.

[taeric]

I think the more concerning facet will be proving that the response actually came from the user.

Which is ultimately why many systems encourage you to go through already established and protected schemes for doing things.

[bitJericho]

When you have tens of thousands of customers that's a lot of emails.

[umurkontaci]

I think that's the point of the article too. If you are not prepared to handle 1% auto-responder rate which you can weed out which some code; you are sending too many emails.

[BillinghamJ]

I do, and it isn't a problem. If you have the people needed to handle thousands of emails from customers a day, those same people can very easily filter a couple of hundred automated emails.

What actually is more of a problem is spam and unsolicited non-customer email. But still, it takes half a second to close them.