Best practices for handling change of email auto-replies when there's a user account

Question

Scenario: the Example company has some sort of front-end system that uses the customer's email address as the user ID.

Example.com sends a marketing email to bob@harvard.com (which would be Bob's user ID on Example.com), and gets back an auto-reply that Bob is no longer at Harvard and that all communication should now go to bob@yale.com.

How is such a thing typically handled? Is there an expectation that all communications from Example.com should now go to bob@yale.com - especially since Bob's account on the web site is still bob@harvard.com?

Answer 1

It's not handled at all; those auto-replies don't have a standard format at all. Worse, those marketing emails are often sent from a no-reply@example.com address, which doesn't exist or isn't monitored. In the rare cases it is, I guess one could manually scan for those replies, but depending on your jurisdiction it might not even be legal to change the e-mail address.

Many sites do offer the option to have a 'contact email' in the user profile, which is used for communication instead of the user ID. But users have to update those themselves.