This is the do-not-reply email from one of my latest messages:

Ken Edwards <do-not-reply-P6072472@meancodemedia.clientsection.com>

My client hits reply and sends a long email out to the great nothingness, and I have to explain why I had not read it yet. I am sure this sounds familiar to you. I see a problem with the current way this is handled, and I see a solution for the future.

DO NOT REPLY <do-not-reply-P6072472@meancodemedia.clientsection.com>

If the above were used, my end user would not see “Ken Edwards” in the To field when they hit reply in their email app, they would see “DO NOT REPLY.” I think this is part of the problem, my user thinks that since it says “Ken Edwards” (in many email clients it hides the actual email address) it will go to me. The email obviously does not get delivered.

Wouldn’t it make sense to change $primaryAccountHolder to the literal of “DO NOT REPLY” so it hits people over the head that they are not, in fact, sending an email to Ken Edwards? I think that would help the situation.

Beyond that, why not have the Repy-To field setup to use the primary account holder’s email address. So that those emails my clients send to me, actually get to me. Maybe have some external email settings like there are external FTP settings for uploading files.

We would all love our clients to read the “DO NOT REPLY TO THIS EMAIL To comment on this message, visit:” text at the bottom of the email, but we all know they do not.

This would solve some headaches I am having with Basecamp, and I am sure others have run into this same situation.

Second that – juts have them sent to a specified email address – could be account owner.

So this doesn’t strike anyone else as a problem?

meancode,

i’m running into the same problem. one thing i’ve found: on file uploads there is a Reply with the do-not-reply email addy, but there’s also a Reply To addy that pulls from whatever you have set up in your account and i’ll actually get reply emails from that. i don’t know why they don’t set up the messages to work in the same way. obviously we’d all prefer our clients logged into basecamp to reply via the comments, but some people just don’t get it. : (

I agree this could be done better… but doesn’t 37s send a nice bounce message if you do goof this up? It’s not like the mail just goes into space never to be seen from again I don’t think.

Josh,

Just tested it and have had nothing back after 15 mins!

Richard

I thought that was pretty odd too.

I’d much prefer the email go to a comment response to whatever was sent out or just my own email address. I’m fine with getting email responses!

Josh, mail just goes into space never to be seen from again.

Thats the problem.

I have never seen what the reply-to looks like on file uploads. If it works as you describe, then I see absolutely no reason why it doesn’t do that for messages too.

Son of a gun, file upload messages have my email in the reply-to field:

Reply-To: Ken Edwards <ken@meancode.com>

So… the question is, why isn’t the same code used for sending out messages?

In message emails, no Reply-To is in the internet headers. Come on 37signals, this is an oversight when Files emails contain the Reply-To of the Account Owner and the Messages emails do not.

Adding that to the Messages emails would sure be nice. Please?

Meancode,

The plot thickens. Just looked at some of my email messages and for everything apart from file uploads, the do-not-reply email address is used for replies. However, with file uploads it is the user’s email address not the account owner that is shown.

I agree with you – this must be an oversight – why else would 2 different approaches be used. If it can work for files, let’s have it for messages too please.

R

I’ll throw my hat in on this one too. More than once my clients have tried replying to messages they get, only to find out a week later that I never got their reply. YES, people should be able to read the note that says DO NOT REPLY. But the fact is: not everyone is even 1/10 as tech-savvy as WE would like them to be. In their world, they get an email, they reply to an email.

Believe me, I’m ALL FOR the concept of no email at all and just using Basecamp, but that’s clearly not going to happen with most clients.

Throwing mine in, to. Yes, it’s a big problem. I work with retailers and for whatever reason there are many of them that reply to my Base Camp message emails and occasionally I get “yelled at” for “never” responding to emails and it’s because of this. Either they aren’t getting a bounce back or aren’t paying attention to it, but it’s not obvious to them apparently that they should not reply to the Base Camp email. I personally don’t care if they DO reply to the email directly, would be fine with me, but if S37 really wants to prohibit it, DO NOT REPLY needs to be part of the senders name (ie. take it right onto the name, not just the email address itself which may be hidden enough to the receiver).

I have the same problem too i.e. the first response of a team member is to reply back to the email, not log into their account. Is there a way to add a feature so that an email reply gets posted to the comment thread just like an email gets posted to a page in Backpack?

for messages, a reply to the email should post to the message thread. This solves the blackberry problem that my clients have. They can see the message thread on the email – but they cannot add to the message thread until they are back at their computers in the office. By that time, they have 100 more emails and have forgotten that they needed to reply.

Some of my clients – if they cannot instantly send me a reply on their blackberry – they just don’t bother due to the VOLUME of email they get.

+1 for the reply to message thread. This is a HUGE problem.

+1