"From" email addresses getting replies

[Anonymous]

I am using the "from" email address as a sales rep and the "reply-to" as one of our generic mailboxes that is monitored by other people to filter out auto-replies and such. However, I have received multiple complaints from sales reps that auto-replies have been coming back to them (sometimes this is in the 100s). I thought all replies were supposed to go to the "reply-to" address. Can anyone help with this? I don't want to put the from email as our generic mailbox because open rates suffer.

[Jenn_DiMaria2 · Accepted solution]

Here is a thread about this: Re: Issue with "reply to"

It seems like because auto-responders aren't technically a reply, it hovers somewhere in the middle and could go either way.

[Josh_Hill13]

Yeah, it generally goes to the From name in those cases. Reps should be prepared for that, or you should use semi-fake email boxes to handle this.

[Anonymous]

Hi Josh,

When you say "semi-fake" email, what do you mean by that?  One that does not look generic like marketing@companyname.com to help with open rates?  Would it be strange to have the name be our VP and the email to be another employee's at our company?

Thanks for the help.

Mary

[Anonymous]

Josh Hill​ I'm curious too. What do you mean by "semi-fake?" Are you saying set the from email as a fake address?

[SanfordWhiteman]

I think what Josh means is something like kaleena.i.weber@example.com when your real address is kweber@example.com, or weberk@example.com when your real address is kaleena.weber@example.com, etc. Something that is a believable person-to-person address but is actually an alias that goes elsewhere.

I myself am partial to using a semi-fake domain name instead, i.e kaleena.weber@mktg.example.com.

[Josh_Hill13]

Yes, that's what I meant.

Interesting idea. My first implementation we used the secondary domain alias as sanford suggests.

[Anonymous]

Siftrock is an awesome way to deal with all sorts of auto-reply issues. Super helpful. The software checks on all OOO replies and just forwards the human messages on to you. They now have a Marketo integration, too.