>> it's worse to give the appearance of attention if you don't have the means to deliver on that promise.

Good call actually. In which case I think better to go with something like what Wufoo does, I believe theirs is something like "friendlyrobot" and if you reply to it, it sends you a friendly message explaining that nobody checks that mailbox, but there is a support desk they can contact. FTW.

Would be better if they didn't go to that trouble and just forwarded it on.

It's acting as a captcha — otherwise they'd have to deal with a shitton of automated replies and bounces from the customers and their crappy mailservers

Surely it's the job description of customer service to deal with hassles in order to make users' lives easier?

Often times customer service == the development team == the marketing team == the executives == you

When you're a small shop, dealing with this kind of stuff day in, day out can get very taxing.

OK, so set up a filtration system. If you're good enough to build a system capable of running at that level you should be able to set up some basic mail filters or even a more complex bayesian filter to knock out at least bounces and probably a good percentage of autoreplies too.

Removing noise from a system isn't a job where it's perfect or useless; a substantial reduction is often quite good enough.

I don't see why it's necessary to make this complicated: "friendlyrobot" is the filtration system. As you said, it doesn't need to be perfect to be useful.

Bounces and auto-responders can be parsed and separated from human responses.

Hate to subject customers to a captcha when they need support!

What was the problem? Junk? Autoresponders? Somthing else? Junk is easy to weed out if you run it through Gmail. Autoresponders can be managed for the most part with filtering (although there's room for dedicated tools here).

We were a six person department managing 600 websites, for musicians. The worst were for sites that catered to older clienteles.

The issue was staffing mostly. Unsolicited demo issues secondly and "faster horse" syndrome thirdly.

So what's the difference between using noreply, and using somnething like replybot and ... just ignoring those e-mails 99% of the time?

The implication of what the change in the "from" affordance meant to the user.

When we switched from "no-reply" to an actual address (help@artistdomain.com), and we couldn't respond, people got angry.

What is 'faster horse' syndrome, out of interest? Never heard that but it sounds good.

Given the ability to suggest things, users will always demand a faster horse, more sleep, more sex and to lose weight.

Basically its saying, don't solicit opinions because it all normalizes to "I want things to be better"