Every so often someone sends me, or the PuTTY team, an email whose gist is ‘I would like to discuss a [ business proposition | project | piece of work | half-baked idea | whatever ] with you’. No further information (but enough personalisation to be sure it isn't spam). We generally reply ‘go on then’, with varying degrees of sarcasm depending on mood, and then they send some details of their actual suggestion.

I've never quite understood why they bother with the initial zero-content opening email. It delays the useful part of the conversation by an entire round trip, and doesn't seem to serve any useful purpose. I suppose if the description of the idea was going to be very long, they might feel it was worth giving us a chance to say ‘don't bother’ before they went to the effort of typing it all up, but if they don't give any detail in the first message then there's no way we can make an intelligent judgment about whether we're interested! (Well, except that if the mail talks about a ‘business proposition’ then they tend to be to do with website advertising, so we're usually not. But occasionally they want to pay us to add a useful feature to PuTTY, so we can't even reject them on that basis until we know more.)