> Typing away merrily, Kalum Somaratna aka Grendel produced the immortal words:
> > > If bounces had a more personal text, I am afraid more people would act
> > > that way.
>
> > This would not happen if it is made clear that the sender is *not* a
> > human, Ie: a line like "as sincerely as software could be" will make
> > things very clear to the recepient that this is *not* a human..
>
> Muahahahaaaaaa ..... *rotfl*
?? Whats there to laugh at ;)
>
> You've not dealt with end-users very much, have you?
Hmm...not many but around 5000...
>
> There's this thing called a bell-curve. Proportionally, there's not
> many _really_ clueless ones, but the bigger the population sample, the
> more people you have below a certain clueless threshold. Yes, that sort
> of phrase makes it clear, but people _would_ still respond. Yes, those
> people would have to be unbelievably daft.
Sure understood.
Yes, but you owe it to deal with your users especially those people that
get it wrong...
Fr ex: My solution for the above would be to, for every person that posts
to MAILER_DAEMON, automatically send him a prewritten explicit letter
explaining that this is not the address of a human and that mail sent to
this address is not and never will be read, and a few lines about the
futility of sending mail to the addy.
By this simple step you not only enlighten your users (they are highly
unlikely to make the same mistake again) but you solve your problem with
virtually no sweat at all.....
> 0.001% of several tens of millions of people, is still a lot of people
> with the ability to directly send you email, from all over the world.
> And this doesn't even account for the people for whom English is not a
> first language, and who don't understand the word 'sincerely' or the
> 'could be' clause.
Obviousy I see that you must be enjoying the arcane syntax of many things
and don't have user friendliness as your priority...
Just see the difference between "Update your program version" and "please
update your program version", it makes things much more easier to the user
especially when you are fuming..
Just see why many people like windoze, it's because of it's user friendly
attitude.
I have been developing software for some time and I find that if a app has
kind and has informative error messages and is user friendly, people will
continue to come back to use it...
> More chatty bounce messages are a bad idea. The only things I'd
> consider changing the bounce message for are:
> * in a country where English is not the native language, put a
> translation first (and leave the English in below as a common
> language for mails from abroad)
> * adding in an extra line beforehand, something like:
> '*** MACHINE-GENERATED MAIL INDICATING A PROBLEM ***'
i. This is the qmail-send program at web.lu. 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.
In the above "chatty" messsage generated by the qmail program, it clearly
says "This is the qmail-send **program**"
If the user is unable to understand something as elementary that a program
is something not human, then there really is nothing for you to do..even a
non chatty message will get replied to..you mean to say that then he can
understand that "MACHINE-GENERATED MAIL" is not from a human...
>
> Designing a system designed to scale to more than 20 users and making
> end-user competence a pre-requisite is perhaps not a good idea.
What baffles me is that how do you get them to do something with your
system if you don't expect a certain degree of competence from them...
>Scaling
> to more than 100 people and assuming intelligence above chimpanzee level
> is foolhardy. Designing a system which should scale to the size of the
> Internet population and _requiring_ the intelligence of a slug is going
> to cause you serious grief if there's any way that error messages will
> provide a way to contact you.
Ohh....I see..so we don't provide any way that the user can get back at
us...right....what a wonderful idea..LOL... :)
Yes lets send all the mail to root@localhost to /dev/null and be damned
with them...:)
Well the problem is that say that you are serving millions of people and
someone wants to contact you about something wrong with your services...he
or she will have no way to do so and you won't be any wiser about your
malfunctioning servers...
Best Wishes,
Grendel
Hi, I'm a signature virus. plz set me as your signature and help me spread
:)
