I've never had someone be weirded out that someone replied to their e-mail. Usually they're thankful that someone explained how they should go about replying. They're usually older folks who aren't tech-savvy and are contributing to a wiki for the first time, so they need a little extra help in order to become regular contributors.

If you do reply with a canned message, I would recommend a message that breaks it down a bit like:

Hi,

The response you sent to this e-mail address wasn't received by the person you wanted to send it to. There was a link in the original e-mail with the talk page of the person you wanted to send your reply to. Make sure to click on that, and write your message on that person's talk page so that they see it. If you need help with this, feel free to e-mail [???]

--
Krystle
Community Support
http://www.wikiHow.com  




On Mon, Jun 17, 2013 at 4:42 PM, Andrew Garrett <agarrett@wikimedia.org> wrote:
It wouldn't be too tricky. Just have it point to an auto-responder that sends back a message:

This email address is not monitored, and your reply has been discarded. If you wished to respond to a notification that you received from this e-mail address, please click on the link in the email that you received, and respond directly on the web.

-- 
Andrew Garrett
Software Engineer, Features
Wikimedia Foundation

On Tuesday, 18 June 2013 at 1:37 AM, Matthew Flaschen wrote:

On 06/17/2013 06:49 PM, Oliver Keyes wrote:
That's a good point. Are all the echo notification emails going to
/dev/null or do we have any way of looking at if they get a reply via email?

I can't think of a good, scalable way to handle such mistaken replies.
It should be clearly marked (this could perhaps improve) that you can't
reply by email.

If someone replies despite that, they would probably be weirded out to
see someone random user or staff member read their email, and is now
telling them manually how to do it in the future.

Matt Flaschen

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