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Comment by dsr_ | Hacker News Reader

Hi. This is the qmail-send program at yahoo.com. 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. : 72.1.169.10 does not like recipient. Remote host said: 550 : Recipient address rejected: undeliverable address: unknown user: "[list name]" Giving up on 72.1.169.10.

That's a pretty good error message. Most people glaze over as soon as they see it.

Most people ignore the content of error messages as soon as they realize what they're reading. An awfully large percentage of people ignore it entirely.

I don't know what to do about people.

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For an overwhelming majority of nontechnical users, no, it is not a good error message. It is filled with confusing technical things that he/she shouldn't have to care about, like HTTP status codes and IP addresses. Even if these people chose to read the whole thing, they still would have no idea what is going on. So it's a terrible error message.

"I'm afraid I wasn't able to deliver your message to the following addresses: ..."

Seems reasonable to me.

It would be reasonable to someone reading HN, since we probably are not scared off by technical jargon. Even if the instructions were spelled out completely, the plain-text formatting and numbers (IP addresses) immediately tell the average user that this is over their head and they ignore it. It's not user-friendly for real-world users.

Yeah, but UIs aren't there for reading; they're for using. If I get an undeliverable because the recipient was bad, then the UI just needs to indicate, "Bad Recipient."

People are doing energy management all the time, and that's not a bad thing. They see something that looks technical at a glance (it's got numbers and slashes and run-on sentences) and that's it. They know they're not technical, and they don't aspire to be technical, so they don't waste energy trying to comprehend the message.

I know plenty of non technical people and they all understand the concept of bounced emails. Error 238B is terrible but "can't deliver email to ben.cornwalll@test.com" and 90% of people can understand they miss spelled the guys email address. It's only after that they their eyes gloss over and their mind shuts down.

It looks OK, but it's not for a single reason: who is "I" in this sentence? This is enough to confuse most of the users.

Those would be SMTP codes. I don't see why it's hard not to understand that "your message was not delivered to this user". The traceback should probably be sent to the postmaster rather than back to the user, but that's an anachronism of the mail servers, which were built back in a time when all email users were technical.

>Recipient address rejected: undeliverable address: unknown user //

Hmm, it's okay.

It's a person masquerading as a computer masquerading as a person. This doesn't really help IMO. Why can't it be

"Hi, this is the Yahoo! email support team. You sent a message to someone but when we tried to pass it on the email address didn't work so we can't send the email for you. Here's some things to try ... technical details and the text of the email you sent are below [or attached]."

The response could also include info like that the domain is live.

That sounds like someone at Yahoo is reading my email.

Well the chances are slim because they cant read that much at a time.

Probably a computer at the CIA is reading it though.

> Hi, this is the Yahoo! email support

Immediate deletion as a phishing scam before reading further.

> "Hi, this is the Yahoo! email support team...

At this point a large number of users will reply to the email expecting to reach the Yahoo! email support team, who of course can help with every individual bounced email. They will be disappointed when this doesn't work out.

Years ago one of the VPs at a client of mine demanded that I change the wording of Qmail bounce messages because he found them snarky and offensive.

(I didn't change it.)

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