Comment by gkoberger
11 hours ago
The no-reply is an interesting decision. I get how difficult it is to run a company like Coinbase (their biggest strength, centralized + customer support, is also what enables this social engineering), but feels like an odd choice.
Their "customer support" includes not expecting users to set up PGP to communicate with them. Email is not a secure method of communication by default.
It's fine to send a notification instructing them to visit the secure portal for more info, though. Hence, no-reply.
Yeah, I totally understand it!
no-reply is a good practice. No business should ever encourage their customers to reply to the emails they are sending out. That's what scammers do.
To contact the company you should go to company website at the address you know (which shouldn't be given in email as well), log in and send a message through internal message system, possibly referring to the email that you recieved through a random code (those can be auto-suggested if they recently tried to contact you by email).
If you do anything else your communication knwowingly mimics communication of a scammer.
Unrequested email should always only be one way communication. Email is too untrustworthy for it to be anything more.
> No business should ever encourage their customers to reply to the emails they are sending out.
It’s fascinating that we keep creating new technology and then find out that in practice most of it cannot be trusted. Which means it cannot be used for anything serious.
IT revolution is a bit of a failure
The first "email" was sent in the 1971 and SMTP was designed in 1983. Back then the implementers didn't dream of the adoption levels of these protocols that we see today. Your same complaint could be levied against the best practices for phone calls in order to avoid scams, and that's also a slightly older technology.
Some of these technologies that have been mass adopted because they're easily accessible also have glaring security holes and ways to be exploited built into them. It's a tale as old as time, and I can hardly blame businesses in this specific case (using no-reply addresses.)