Born On The Web

I love sending/getting emails. Even after all those years of emailing it still feels good to start up your outlook after a no internet weekend and see your mails flowing in. I find exchanging mails more amusing than communicating over instant messanging. But there are times you can’t put a lot of time in reading and answering mails. It’s important that your contact has made the message clear, the shorter the mail the better.

As flapi developers we get lots of emails with mostly problems installing/configuring flapi. I don’t mind answering and helping out people, but it’s difficult to help if you send an email like this one:

Sorry for my English, I´m from Spain, I´ve tried your Flapi viewer and is great but it doesnt appear in my blog when I copy the code.

Yep that’s right, that’s it. You can understand, it isn’t easy to help someone with this limited info. If I have a busy day I simply don’t bother replying. I don’t mind his bad english, he should of give me the url of the page, or explain to me what went wrong. In the end we could help him out, so he was lucky. I just want to make clear that your email has to invite your contact for a reply, or an action.

A great article summarizes how to send the perfect mail. It would be great if this rules became widly adapted. I’m not a perfect emailer either, so this is a call for all you savvy programmers, program an email-etiquette-checker as the sister of the spelling check. It will make my life as well as yours easier.

They should learn how to email in secundairy school, because I got the following email from a girl in my chiro group. It took me half an hour to figure out what she was really trying to tell me. Sorry for my dutch… can somebody try to translate ?!

seg ik was vergete da aan os ma te vage e, of da eilek wel mocht en ging enz ma nu blijkt da wij zaterdag nar een feest moete, en ze zei ok van ja XXX nu da ze op weekend gaan zulde gij wel mee wille ma gij zij al kweetnie hoe lang niemeer na de chiro gegaan enz, en nu zegt ze dus dak nie mee mag e en eum YYY joa bij die ga et ook moeilek want nu blijkt et da dieje papa dees weekend gaa verhuize, en nu moet die mee gaan helpe enz, ma ik hoop da da nie te veel probleme geeft, omdak int begin zei van da ek wel meeging en nu niemer . allee en moest da wel een probleem geve voor et een of et ander, laat da dan ma wete e wantja, allee

Ok, you can be informal, I don’t even mind if you use a bit of dialect but this made me scratch my head. No spacing, no sentences, no begin, no end, fioew … I guess next saturday afternoon will be a not so fun chiro afternoon :p. But hey, in the end I don’t mind, they’re all wonderfull (+-)kids.

Can you see where the dialect is from?

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