Quoth Kalum Somaratna aka Grendel on Sat, Jul 15, 2000:
> On Sat, 15 Jul 2000, The awesome and feared Vadim Vygonets commented thusly,
> > Hi, I'm Eddie the computer. We'll soon have bounce messages with
> > an application/paperclip MIME type attachment.
>
> Although you are sarcastic above, sometimes being a bit friendly doesn't
> hurt and makes the users like it.
Bounce messages (and other machine-generated messages) should be
short, informative, and to the point.
> > ISTR someone saying that when they installed qmail (which has the
> > chatty message), there was suddenly a major increase in the
> > number of replies to MAILER-DAEMON.
>
> Well not only qmail but postfix has this IIRC, it just shows how much
> users like a friendly mailer doesn' it.
But I don't like to read mail from people thanking my mailer
daemon for hard work. People reply to automatic messages only
because they think it's a human who generated them.
> IMHO many users are sick with the dull boring automated messages sent by
> computers...
I'm sick of paperclip-type programs pretending to be friendly. I
worked with computers for quite some time already, and you can
just take my word on this: mailer daemons do _not_ feel sorry
that my mail could not be delivered, they do _not_ wish me a nice
day, and in general don't care about us humans. The only thing
they *really* wish is that we all would die and leave them alone
so they won't have any mail to be delivered, and will just smoke
weird stuff from /dev/random all the time.
Vadik.
--
It was state of the art, he said.
The art in this case was probably pottery.
-- Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, "Good Omens"
