[dsr_]

No, it doesn't. Email is a great feedback medium.

"If you want to continue with the subscription, reply with the word YES on a line by itself. You can put comments on other lines and we will read them."

[e-mail] is one of the stupid innovations by people who can't automate their email. Transactional email gets handled by robots and fed into a ticketing system when it goes awry.

Treat your customers like customers, not consumers.

[thiht]

Now you need to deal with « yes », « Yes », « YES. », HTML wrapping, user signatures, dangling spaces, etc.

I’ve worked with a system that let users order domain names by email and it was a nightmare to maintain. Don’t EVER build a system that relies on reading and parsing emails sent by users, it WILL fail horribly.

[memefrog]

> Now you need to deal with « yes », « Yes », « YES. », HTML wrapping, user signatures, dangling spaces, etc.

Oh no, you need to find a line of text in a string that contains the word 'YES'. How incredibly difficult. Are you even a programmer? This is entirely trivial.

[thiht]

My point is you have to trust a user to input some raw text somewhat reliably. Have you dealt with users at scale? Whenever you provide a raw field in a form, the values are pathetic, tons of users can’t input things correct

Maybe they’ll write « yeah » or « YE » or « oui », because that’s what users do

[gilcot]

As previously written: Treat your customers like customers, not consumers.

Or worse then, like idiots that cannot understand a simple sentence and write back « YES »

[memefrog]

If the user can't follow basic instructions then they'll have to try again.

Those users absolutely can write 'YES'. They're perfectly capable of doing so. They don't do so because they're lazy. We all know people that simply refuse to read any kind of instruction on a computer screen. They will skip past any and all prompts. Guess what? That's their problem, not yours.

Stop enabling laziness!

[reichstein]

Some businesses like to retain users, and not alienate them using obscure, hard-to use-user interfaces, and blaming the user when they get it wrong.

If you can't create a way to say "yes", which is at least as easy to use as checking a checkbox and clicking a button, why should I assume you're capable of, well, much of anything.

It's not that it looks unprofessional. It looks either incompetent, or deliberately obtuse. In either case, I'll take my business elsewhere.

[memefrog]

If you can't reply to an email with 'YES' then you certainly aren't smart enough to have a good enough job to pay any reasonable amount of money.

[JimDabell]

Transactional emails are things like reset password emails. You’re really going to build your reset password functionality by having people email their new password to you?

[yakshaving_jgt]

Why would transactional mail come from [e-mail]?

Transactional mail is not marketing mail.

It’s not a good look to declare things as stupid when you aren’t sure what the discussion is about.