Autoresponders from subscribers
A lot of my subscribers set autoresponders notifying senders that they are on vacation or have changed jobs, etc. So after each campaign, I end up receiving a bunch of email from my subscribers' autoresponders. I'm sure some of you have experienced this. What do you do about it?
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Depending on if the campaigns are purely marketing mails then you should probably just set your reply-to address to a no-reply type mailbox which you can set up to just handle these and then clean it out at regular intervals. Or you could set your no-reply address to forward to /dev/null if you don't feel like cleaning out the mailbox (see more here: http://www.serverwatch.com/columns/article.php/3844371/Forwarding-a-Postfix-Virtual-Alias-to-devnull.htm)
I wouldn't recommend that; folks should be able to hit reply and hit a human being. I generally just delete those messages as they come in; if you use a standard subject line format, or get creative w/filters, you can probably filter autoresponse vacation messages pretty easily for batch perusal to make sure you didn't catch a real email by accident.
Thanks both of you.
I didn't use a no-reply address because I suspect that that would increase the chance of my emails getting marked as spam by some spam filters. I don't know if that's correct though. Anyone have insight on this?
Sending clients should set an auto-reply header following rfc3834. Unfortunately this list of autoresponder headings shows these are not implemented consistently.
Then again: your e-mailclient must be able to search for this header... Gmail can't AFAIK so you're stuck on either filtering on a lot of word combinations or deleting them one-by-one.
I wouldn't set a no-reply so people can get in touch with a human being easily. I believe it's also against the law to set a noreply in some countries.
Has anyone discovered a way to exclude the auto-responders and out-of-office replies from your campaign reports? I ran a test with this using an auto-reply for my own email client (not server-side) and realized that it does count as an open, which can really throw off evaluating the success of a mailing.
@tjpanda If you did 'opened' the email (regardless of whether you have 'auto-reply' setup in your email client), it's counted as an 'open'.