I don’t do errors, and my name isn’t Google
ayende.com
ayende.com
Assuming that the person isn't stupid, they can theoretically understand the answer, but they haven't found the answer before emailing you.
NearlyFreeSpeech charges people under a penny a month, most of the time, for hosting, and gladly answers any question posed. But they have a prominent notice that it's not free to answer a question, and would people please help themselves by searching the fora first.
Perhaps you could helpfully say, "If you've got a specific error message, chances are lots of other people have had that error message too, and blogged about it: google any sufficiently long error message, and you might find the answer there. People don't usually answer here within the hour, but ask away if you can't find it."
Why would you waste your time getting angry at random clueless people on the internet?
"This is the nature of the beast. Developers build software. The good ones support it, and the bad ones make it someone else's problem. The good ones write documentation, and the bad ones tell you to read the code.
I can sympathize with your situation. I go through something similar nearly every day at work, but I am not the kind of person who will tell someone to %!@# off because they don't know how to search for errors in Google.
Searching for errors with google is strange at first for everyone I think. The best thing to do is to both answer the question directly and refer them to a google search that would give them the same answer (with the keywords you used, and perhaps WHY you chose those keywords). I know it sucks, but I remember being a greenhorn and not knowing how to search for some syntax-laden error, which parts of that error would help me in Google, and so on. Some of it was brute force, and some of it was learning by example.
In short, don't be so quick to assume someone is lazy for asking a question. Don't be so quick to assume someone is stupid because they haven't been Googling compiler errors for 10 years. Google has a simple design, but that doesn't mean the construction of queries is equal in its ease. I think most people need a refresher on Boolean logic and how it works in their queries. Google has pretty much put that in their black box, IMHO, to the detriment of a lot of newbs to the net. Perhaps google should consider putting up a little mini guide on how one might search for things they find in particular contexts. Errors should certainly be in that list. I consider myself a pretty good Googler (although I think this mentality is the same as everyone believing they're good at driving or thinking they themselves have a good sense of humor), but I would happily read an official Google writeup on tips for extracting good search terms from example contexts. "
Patience is a virtue.
From my experience running xp-dev.com - I do get a good handful of users submitting support tickets that sounds really really arcanely simple, but my approach is to reply and solve their issue and immediately put it in on the wiki.
Even then, there are some users who don't read the wiki and help documentation at all, and rather than loosing patience, I just point them towards the docs and most are happy to read it and say thank you.
Only once did I have a really long conversation with a user, but he/she? was really new to the world of bug tracking and version control systems, and just needed a little hand-holding. The whole conversation is going up on the wiki as well.
In fairness, he has had a couple mildly interesting posts on depedency injection.