It drives me out of my mind I get e-mails that say things like “custsvc” or “orders” as the sender name.

A lot of studies have been done, and have shown that e-mail sent from a “trusted” name has greater deliverability and a higher open rate. If you’re e-mailing me about my Verizon FiOS order, you might e-mail me as “Verizon FiOS” or “FiOS Customer Service,” for example. “Customer Service” is lame because I have no idea whose Customer Service department is e-mailing me. It’s a moot point, though, because the name shown on the e-mail sent to me by Verizon FiOS is actually from “volconsumer”

I don’t even understand how this happens to anyone but people just learning how to hook a web application up to e-mail, though. If you just sent an e-mail, it will default to whatever Linux/UNIX user you’re logged in as, and I’m pretty sure that’s why I get e-mails from fantastically vague senders.

But the thing is, it’s not the least bit professional, and it’s really not even acceptable by any industry standards. Here are a few things ways you might get around it:

• Set up a real name for your Linux/UNIX account. I might log in as “mwagner” but my name is “Matthew Wagner.” Most any mailer will use the real name if it’s available. Piping something through the “mail” command will use your real name, so I’d imagine that anything from the past two decades will use that information if it’s there. Don’t be lazy when setting up users that are going to send mail.
• Better yet, specify who the mail is from, rather than letting your mailer default to the UNIX account it’s running at. Why would you ever send mail as webuser@www101.production anyway? You can run as webuser, but you set mail to come from “Acme Corp Support” with an e-mail of support@example.com. This isn’t a clever trick I have up my sleeve. It’s called SMTP.

The thing that bugs me is that this isn’t some profound insight I have. It’s common sense that anyone who has a basic understanding of, well, anything remotely relevant to what I’m talking about knows all about. Why Adidas, Verizon, Gamehouse, FDC Servers, Google Wave, Newegg, GoDaddy, and Kohl’s (from a random sampling of my Inbox) can’t figure it out boggles my mind. You hurt your deliverability and open rate, lose customer’s confidence, and confuse people… All because you couldn’t spent five minutes of an entry-level engineer’s time to actually set a “From” address on your outgoing mail?