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I deleted my AcademiaSE profile, and nearly had a heart attack when I received a confirmation email from Stack Overflow ([email protected]) with a subject line of "Your profile has been deleted".

Why is this notification sent from an email address that appears to be for another site on the network?

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12
  • 1
    Stack Overflow is the company.
    – Optimus Prime
    Commented Oct 11, 2017 at 10:21
  • 1
    @redhand But why does Stack Overflow have its own email, but not the other networks?
    – GoatsWearHats
    Commented Oct 11, 2017 at 10:33
  • 1
    That's what I answered. Stack Exchange is not the company. Stack Overflow is the company. So, they registered a domain with the company name
    – Optimus Prime
    Commented Oct 11, 2017 at 10:35
  • 7
    Perhaps it would help if they changed the subject to "Your profile on Foo Stack Exchange has been deleted"?
    – yannis
    Commented Oct 11, 2017 at 10:37
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    @yannis That would at least be a start. Often the first thing someone sees when notified of an email (particularly on mobile, at least for me) is the sender though, and I feel like it's weird to send an email about an SE site from an address that looks like another SE site.
    – GoatsWearHats
    Commented Oct 11, 2017 at 10:42
  • why should they? there is some meta post regarding it. I can't find it atm.
    – Optimus Prime
    Commented Oct 11, 2017 at 10:42
  • 1
    We might want to add the originating email address in the announcement
    – rene Mod
    Commented Oct 11, 2017 at 10:46
  • wrt to SE,Inc vs SO,Inc: meta.stackexchange.com/q/266410/158100 they don't seem to be utterly clear or consistent about it as well. The answer there reads to me as; use SO or SE at your convenience.
    – rene Mod
    Commented Oct 11, 2017 at 10:50
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    @GoatsWearHats It's not about buying 2 domains, we'd have to buy many more than that, Ask Ubuntu, Math Overflow, Super User, Server Fault, Stack Apps, and Stack Exchange .email domains. Then we'd need certificates for all of them. And we'd need IPs or aliases for them. And DMARC support. And reputation monitoring. And we'd have to build into the entire system what to send from where. These added up are significantly more than "just buying another domain". Not that it helps much, but I wanted to illustrate the scale of the simple fix implied here...because it's not simple.
    – Nick Craver StaffMod
    Commented Oct 11, 2017 at 12:19
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    One more note: bear in mind when people want to whitelist our email address so they always get it, we'd be asking users to whitelist 7 domains (so far), not just one. That's cost put on users, not us. That is something we very actively try to avoid.
    – Nick Craver StaffMod
    Commented Oct 11, 2017 at 12:20
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    Might be a simpler matter of changing the sender's name (not the email address) to the site in question? That's entirely arbitrary as far as I remember- so "Acedemia.se<do-not-reply@....>
    – Journeyman Geek
    Commented Oct 11, 2017 at 12:23
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    Changing the subject line to insert the specific site seems easiest. Changing the sender name (not email address) would also work; I don't know how hard that is. We don't need to change the actual email address and, as Nick said, we want people to be able to easily whitelist SE.
    – Monica Cellio
    Commented Oct 11, 2017 at 15:19

1 Answer 1

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For the reasons outlined by Nick Craver in comments to the question, we will not change the from address of the email, namely:

  • it is not a simple change, as some people think
  • it will make it difficult to whitelist all SE emails

We have updated the subject line of the emails to include the community name - so this should alleviate such concerns in the future.

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