The endless power of anthropomorphism
Back in the last century when people still used Qmail, it used to emit a message along the lines of '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', which seemed somewhat over-chummy to me. The equivalent of a bloke in a suit calling you 'mate' just before doing something tiresome and expensive.
But then I was used to various incarnations of Sendmail and had yet to abandon both that and qmail for the significantly nicer Postfix.
Qmail (and coffee and TVR) was what drove another.com, which meant a lot of the users weren't apprentice Unix curmudgeons like me but seemed to be mostly students and yout' who really dug 'wacky' domain-names and the virulent pink site-theme known as 'My little porn-star' which no-one would get away with these days.
Quite a lot of these people wrote small notes back to MAILER-DAEMON saying that it was ok, they understood and not to worry about it. That always struck me as rather lovely, if misguided. A few weeks in the trenches of the Usenet (or these days, Twitter) would have cured them of being nice to people on the internet. (NB: Satire.)
If I'd had my brains in, rather than being an apprentice curmudgeon, I'd have hacked up enough of a 'bot to reply to their missives and make canned suggestions about what had gone wrong. From what I remember, they were mostly spelling mistakes or body at the far end having gone over-quota.
But then I was used to various incarnations of Sendmail and had yet to abandon both that and qmail for the significantly nicer Postfix.
Qmail (and coffee and TVR) was what drove another.com, which meant a lot of the users weren't apprentice Unix curmudgeons like me but seemed to be mostly students and yout' who really dug 'wacky' domain-names and the virulent pink site-theme known as 'My little porn-star' which no-one would get away with these days.
Quite a lot of these people wrote small notes back to MAILER-DAEMON saying that it was ok, they understood and not to worry about it. That always struck me as rather lovely, if misguided. A few weeks in the trenches of the Usenet (or these days, Twitter) would have cured them of being nice to people on the internet. (NB: Satire.)
If I'd had my brains in, rather than being an apprentice curmudgeon, I'd have hacked up enough of a 'bot to reply to their missives and make canned suggestions about what had gone wrong. From what I remember, they were mostly spelling mistakes or body at the far end having gone over-quota.