[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.