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Comment by herpderperator | Hacker News Reader

> Your account violated our terms of service specifically fraud.

Honestly, this phrase is raising phishing alarm bells in my head, though xxdesmus said it's `likely legitimate`. The punctuation and capitalization is lacking, and really makes it sound... off.

Edit: I originally thought this was an email, but upon reading the post again it sounds like a response to OP's support ticket. There's a lot less effort involved in responding to a support ticket or chat message than the effort involved in writing up email templates, so my point doesn't quite apply here.

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Yeah, the lack of comma, and the phrase "specifically fraud", are extremely alarming to me.

I understand that not all developers are native English speakers, but far more scammers are non-natives than devs are; not to mention, there are likely checks in companies like this to proofread any text before it goes "live".

> there are likely checks in companies like this to proofread any text before it goes "live".

… yeah … there's really not.

I've both found such errors (there are a few that exist in Azure's stuff, for example. One I know exactly how to trigger: attempt to create a SP for an app in the same tenant as you, but while lacking permission to do so. The error is both grammatically malformed as well as illogical. Azure knows about it … but AFAICT, they don't have the internal processes to fix it.)

I've also caught a few of these before the train left the station as a gratuitous code reviewer. There are definitely some that have slipped by.

At a previous employ, my SO found one in ~10 minutes of playing with our product… and rightly gave me some light-hearted jabs about it.

I'd want to see the whole email. Whether it weighs more towards phish or error would depend on the surrounding context, and whether SPF/DKIM/DMARC pass. (The OP says the did (but it was a later comment), so…)

>to proofread any text before it goes "live".

Not on the internet I use. Even the old school newspapers are failing basic grammar things that anyone calling themself an editor would catch. Mainly, because they are not getting edited at all. Reports get entered into a CMS, a publish button is pressed, viola, first to publish! Yay!!! Only, in the rush, basic grade school grammar is non-existent and makes my brain slow down, and decipher what was meant, and makes me no longer want to keep reading.

> Even the old school newspapers are failing basic grammar things that anyone calling themself an editor would catch.

I've seen articles by the AP (!!) that clearly have not gotten enough scrutiny (typos, etc).

> Reports get entered into a CMS, a publish button is pressed, viola, first to publish!

Publishing articles is no time for stringed instruments [1]. Unless maybe you meant it as some kind of fanfare upon publication? :P

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muphry%27s_law

Spell checking, it's impotent.

> viola

Oh, the irony...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muphry%27s_law

Meh, it's not like native speakers use perfect grammar. People who learned English properly are actually better at punctuation and spelling than most native speakers in my experience. And the transactional messages often get only as much review as any other PR. There's some signal here, but not much.

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