I should note, I current set the FROM as "John Smith <donotreply@mydomain.com>" and set Reply-To to their actual email. That said, I've seen a number of clients ignore the Reply To and send email to the donotreply.
You're doing it right. The important part to avoid DMARC filtering is that the actual email address in the From field match your actual sending domain. The display name doesn't matter (for DMARC filtering).
However, there's another problem: Many email clients hide the email address part by default, and only show the display name. So the recipients may not see "donotreply" without some extra clicking. Worse, if that address gets auto-added to their address book, they may accidentally send to it later: the client autocompletes "John Smith", and the user doesn't realize it's actually your donotreply email.
One way to cut down on this is to include your company in the display name. I usually use:
From: "John Smith via ExampleCo" <donotreply@example.com>
but have also had good results (delivery and open rates) with:
From: "ExampleCo for John Smith" <donotreply@example.com>
Most clients seem to respect the Reply-To header, but they're not required to [1], and some popular MS ones in particular seem to ignore it, at least in some cases [2, 3].
There are a bunch of arguments for avoiding "noreply" addresses in the first place [4, 5]. We started using our customer service email as the from/reply-to for password resets and other service emails, with good results.
But that's not a good option for messages you're sending on behalf of particular users... the replies are probably intended specifically for those users. I'm running into something similar with emailed invitations from my site, and have been thinking about ways to get the replies back to the user doing the inviting.
You could try something like:
From: "John Smith via ExampleCo" <replies+encoded-user-id@example.com>
where "encoded-user-id" is a signed and timestamped identifier that lets you identify your "John Smith" user, so you can forward the reply to them (or insert it in their newsfeed in your product, or whatever makes sense). You'd have to be very careful to validate incoming replies, to avoid creating an open mail relay or a vector for spammers to reach your users. (Services that implement anonymous/private replies, like Craigslist, use an approach like this.)
Does anyone know of any well-tested packages that safely provide this sort of reply forwarding? Or transactional ESPs that offer it directly?
