No Reply Email Address noreply@dwyl.com (antipattern)

[nelsonic]

sending email from a "no reply" is an antipattern we need to avoid.

[rub1e]

Took me a while to remember, but there is a reason for this! Unsurprisingly it's autocrat related 🙄

The email either comes from a generic address (which we can't specify) or the address of the last person to edit the spreadsheet.

To avoid the email coming from a different address every time, we chose to keep it set to the generic no-reply

BUT we set the reply-to address as finance@dwyl.com (screenshot)

Clearly this isn't working so I'll leave a comment on the G+ page

[iteles]

@nelsonic Can I edit the title here to reflect the autocrat bug that the reply-to email address isn't working?

[nelsonic]

Autocrat indeed ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autocracy
Who would call their project/software that ...? 😕

I've searched the HQ issues for "requirements" for what we need(ed) for invoicing all I can see is: #302 ...
Which is not what I would describe as "requirements" ...
any "solution" that forces us to send email as noreply@dwyl.com is not "fit for purpose".
Collecting the data is only part of the requirement.
This is not "Automated" at all; it's a manual process with a form requiring manual input.
a form which leaks data dwyl/process-handbook#97
After the person manually submits their invoice data,
further manual processing is required by an Admin ...
This "solution" has created more work not reduced it
and resulted in a process/UX failure.

@iteles if you are able to update the "from" email address to something that is a valid email address, please do. but given that none of the people who use the "invoicing system" have complained ... if you prefer to just close this issue, please go for it. 👍

[iteles]

Closing this issue because the volume of invoices is very low and this isn't an issue for those people.

We can't change the from address to anything stable other than 'no-reply' because that is a limitation of the software we are using.

The solution here is to use an invoicing system that is fit-for-purpose, which is a separate low priority issue to be opened ((given our current product focus, it will rise in priority as it comes closer in the product roadmap and as requests start to come in for it).

[nelsonic]

@iteles then we need to change the "software" we are using. 👎
Any software designer/developer should know better than to use a no-reply email.
It's terrible UX! 😠

At the very least we should write a "short" (5 min read) blog post on this ... 💭