{"id":29323,"date":"2006-10-19T10:00:02","date_gmt":"2006-10-19T10:00:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.msdn.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/2006\/10\/19\/no-good-deed-goes-unpunished-part-2\/"},"modified":"2006-10-19T10:00:02","modified_gmt":"2006-10-19T10:00:02","slug":"no-good-deed-goes-unpunished-part-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/20061019-02\/?p=29323","title":{"rendered":"No good deed goes unpunished, part 2"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.msdn.com\/oldnewthing\/archive\/2006\/04\/26\/584125.aspx\"> Sometimes you&#8217;re better off keeping your fool mouth shut<\/a>.\n When I reply to a question on an internal discussion list, often with a clarifying question rather than an answer, it will occasionally happen that the person I replied to will send a response directly to me rather than including the discussion list. This is bad for a few reasons.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>I was just trying to help you ask a better question.     I didn&#8217;t sign up to be responsible for the answer.     I have an actual job whose description does not include     &#8220;Solving your personal problems.&#8221; <\/li>\n<li>Sending the response directly to me means that others     on the discussion list miss out on the answer.     (Assuming I even know the answer.)     It also prevents the answer from going into the discussion     list archives. <\/li>\n<li>Sending the response directly to me means that if I happen     to go on vacation or am otherwise unavailable,     you won&#8217;t get an answer to your question.     Other people on the discussion list can&#8217;t chip in with their     advice since you didn&#8217;t include them on the reply. <\/li>\n<li>Sending the response directly to me creates an implied obligation     on me to reply.     I didn&#8217;t sign up for that. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p> When somebody does this, I typically forward the message back to the discussion list with a message like &#8220;I wish they&#8217;d fix that Exchange Server bug where the discussion list keeps getting deleted from the &#8216;To&#8217; line.&#8221; This is a little joke that I use to avoid directly accusing the person of removing the discussion list from the &#8216;To&#8217; line intentionally.<\/p>\n<p> I used to write some variation of &#8220;It&#8217;s that annoying Outlook bug again&#8230;&#8221; but <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.msdn.com\/jensenh\/\"> Jensen Harris<\/a> asked me to stop because they were actually getting bug reports filed into the Outlook defect tracking database that went, &#8220;Outlook is deleting discussion lists from the To line when people reply. Raymond says so, so it must be true.&#8221; The poor Outlook folks had to keep explaining to the people who submitted these bug reports, &#8220;No, Raymond was making a joke (at your expense).&#8221; To take the heat off the Outlook team, I switched to blaming Exchange Server. I have no idea if the <a href=\"http:\/\/msexchangeteam.com\/\"> Exchange Server team<\/a> has their own collection of analogous bugs. They haven&#8217;t asked me to change my joke, so maybe it&#8217;s not a problem for them. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Sometimes you&#8217;re better off keeping your fool mouth shut. When I reply to a question on an internal discussion list, often with a clarifying question rather than an answer, it will occasionally happen that the person I replied to will send a response directly to me rather than including the discussion list. This is bad [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1069,"featured_media":111744,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[25,130,133],"class_list":["post-29323","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-oldnewthing","tag-code","tag-email","tag-no-good-deed-goes-unpunished"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"<p>Sometimes you&#8217;re better off keeping your fool mouth shut. When I reply to a question on an internal discussion list, often with a clarifying question rather than an answer, it will occasionally happen that the person I replied to will send a response directly to me rather than including the discussion list. This is bad [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29323","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1069"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29323"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29323\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29323"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29323"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29323"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}