Showing results for email - The Old New Thing

Jul 3, 2012
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You already got your answer, why are you re-asking the question?

Raymond Chen
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 the cus...

Otheremail
Feb 2, 2012
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When you are looking for more information, it helps to say what you need the information for

Raymond Chen
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 to kn...

Otheremail
Oct 25, 2011
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No good deed goes unpunished: Helping to redirect a question

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

It is a common occurrence that a question is sent to a mailing that is close, but not quite right. Usually somebody will provide information to help redirect the question to a more appropriate mailing list. But this effort does not always go unpunished. From: X A customer is encountering a problem with Product Q when they blah blah blah. C...

OtheremailNo good deed goes unpunished
Feb 24, 2009
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Email tip: Just because you get answers when you misuse a mailing list doesn’t doesn’t mean you should continue to misuse it

Raymond Chen
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 poin...

Otheremail
Jan 20, 2009
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If you didn’t like the answer, asking the same question again is unlikely to help

Raymond Chen
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 call ...

Otheremail
Nov 14, 2008
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Email tip: If you ask a question that can be answered in only one way, but that’s not the answer, don’t be surprised that nobody responds at all

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

It's not infrequent that I see somebody ask a question that can be answered in only one way. But if that's not the answer, then nobody will respond. Is there a module that does XYZ? This question can be answered in only one way: "Yes, here it is." If nobody has written such a module, nobody is going to reply saying, "No, nobody has written the...

Non-Computeremail
Oct 17, 2008
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The cult of PowerPoint, episode 2

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

PowerPoint is a fine presentation tool, but some people have elevated it to the level of a cult. The most recent member of the PowerPoint cult was a customer who decided to use PowerPoint in an email message. No, I don't mean that the customer attached a bad PowerPoint presentation to the email. I mean that the customer's email was itself a thre...

Non-Computeremail
Sep 9, 2008
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If you use an absurd signature, I might end up sending it back to you

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

Despite my previous rant, absurdly elaborate email signatures are still common at Microsoft, and I'm not just talking about the ones that contain information that may be required by department policy. I'm talking about signatures that use bright colors, large fonts, maybe a bitmap or two, sometimes even a photo of the sender! I will sometimes men...

Non-Computeremail