The Old New Thing

A possibly unbeatable record for the shortest amount of time between an email message and its resend

November 13, 2013 Nov 13, 2013 11/13/13

Raymond Chen

I occasionally bring up the issue of people who ask a question and then repeat the question, especially people who repeat the question with some impatience. At the time, the record for the shortest time between the message and its repeat was eight minutes. But I think I have something unbeatable. From: X To: ABC Team I hit this crash in...

You already got your answer, why are you re-asking the question?

July 3, 2012 Jul 3, 2012 07/3/12

Raymond Chen

Today's rant is a blend of two earlier rants: People didn't answer your first email for a reason and If you didn't like the answer, asking the same question again is unlikely to help. A customer submitted a list of questions (via their customer liaison) to the Widgets discussion list, and somebody wrote up a reply, which was sent back to ...

When you are looking for more information, it helps to say what you need the information for

February 2, 2012 Feb 2, 2012 02/2/12

Raymond Chen

It's often the case that when a question from a customer gets filtered through a customer liaison, some context gets lost. (I'm giving the customer the benefit of the doubt here and assuming that it's the customer liaison that removed the context rather than the customer who never provided it.) Consider the following request: We would like ...

Email tip: Just because you get answers when you misuse a mailing list doesn’t doesn’t mean you should continue to misuse it

February 24, 2009 Feb 24, 2009 02/24/09

Raymond Chen

A few years ago, there was a question on a mailing list for topic X, but the question was about unrelated topic Y. The question was nevertheless answered by the people on the topic X mailing list out of the kindness of their hearts (above and beyond the heart-sourced kindness that powers most mailing lists in the first place). I...

If you didn’t like the answer, asking the same question again is unlikely to help

January 20, 2009 Jan 20, 2009 01/20/09

Raymond Chen

I find it surprising how often this happens. A customer liaison will send a question to a mailing list like this: From: X To: Gizmo Discussion Hi, everybody. My customer is using the Gizmo Toolkit and wants to frob a gizmo without first registering as a frobber. They created the gizmo with , passing all the default flags, and then they ...

Email tip: If you want people to look at a screen shot, you have to tell them what they’re looking at

December 9, 2008 Dec 9, 2008 12/9/08

Raymond Chen

Some time ago, Ry Jones decided to take something that I wrote and condense it to make it funnier: Don't embed pictures. ... This isn't Highlights magazine. Those ellipses are deceptive, because they hide a change of topic! As a result, the two unrelated sentences appeared to be connected to each other. The comment about Highlights ...