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[Giagnocavo]Michael::Write()

 Tuesday, June 15, 2004
Programs aren't people!
Attention to all devs who think they are writing “friendly” programs by using a personal voice: stop. I just got this in my inbox:

Subject: failure notice
Hi. This is the qmail-send program at somesite.com. I'm afraid I wasn't able to deliver your message to the following addresses. This is a permanent error; I've given up. Sorry it didn't work out.
<emailATdomain.com> Sorry, I couldn't find any host by that name. (#4.1.2) I'm not going to try again; this message has been in the queue too long.

Makes me think my server needs therapy. I had to suppress the desire to hit reply and say “Oh don't worry, it's ok. I'll try sending the message again later.”

This isn't a friendly Office Assistent, it's a mailer daemon. Yet the devs just couldn't resist making it have feelings. I wonder if it crossed their minds to throw in a dice-roll to determine if the program is feeling sorry, or just annoyed that it couldn't deliver the message. Perhaps sometimes it could be apathetic.

The real problem though is that you have to read and parse emotional English to get the simple error out of this message. Notice that it's not a “friendly” message where common problems and resolutions are suggested, it's just an apologetic technical message. What's wrong with <some descriptive text> followed by: “Error #4.1.2: Host not found. Fatal error, delivery failed.”?
Humour | Misc. Technology
Tuesday, June 15, 2004 4:28:48 AM UTC  #    Comments [3]  |  Trackback Tracked by:
"http://sj1uiza.biz/baby-contest.html" (http://sj1uiza.biz/baby-contest.html) [Pingback]

Tuesday, June 15, 2004 10:01:28 AM UTC
Of course, for Aunt Tilly or Joe User, this works much better.

It could have both, though.
Manuzhai
Tuesday, June 15, 2004 3:10:15 PM UTC
Does it? The current phrasing doesn't make anything easier to understand. For instance, it doesn't say "That email address doesn't seem to exist. Are you sure you typed it correctly?". It still says "host not found", with longer wording. So someone who's not technical still won't get any extra benefit.
Michael Giagnocavo | mggAT NOSPAMAtrevido dot net
Wednesday, June 16, 2004 7:31:43 PM UTC
These must be the devs that didn't get hired by http://www.intellibuddy.com/
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