simont | ‘I would like to speak with you’

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.)

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

You should have a boilerplate reply which lists things you're usually interested in, things you're sometimes interested in and things you're never interested in. But yes, "please contact me" emails and the like do seem to indicate a failure to think things through properly.

Hmm, yes, the boilerplate reply sounds like quite a good idea, although this doesn't come up quite often enough for it to seem worth the effort (though it does come up just often enough for me to wonder about it).

Thinking about it further, I suppose that provided the opening email at least mentions PuTTY (which they do generally manage to, and that's one of the ways I decide they're not spam) it does at least avoid the risk of the sender typing up a huge project description and then finding they've sent it to completely the wrong address by mistake. Though in that situation you'd think they could easily enough recover it from their outgoing mail archive and send it to the right address instead...

The other thing that might be good is a FAQ bit re suggestions.
ie: Feature suggestion: this has been suggested already and is a nice to have but extremely technically difficult and timeconsuming so low-priority unless you want to fund this.. *grin*.

You probably get lots of the same suggestions over and over again...

-grue-

Like this? (http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/wishlist/#pending)

To be fair, people don't always know

simont from Joe Bloggs - they might wish to establish the email address is still current, that it's a real person rather than a marketing company (who may try to take and sell their idea) etc. I can well understand that people will want to feel out their potential contact before committing effort to them.

I wonder if it's to see if a commuinity is alive at all, or if you're not all complete nutters? It's amazing the number of projects which are abandoned, or for which you get replies like "Please sign our NDA, and we will talk to you" or some such in response to just a quick enquiry.

But we know they are complete nutters - thats why we relate so well *grin*
/me rjks

Hm, yes. The idea that the project might be abandoned seems like the most plausible one so far, since it's the only situation in which typing up a huge project description really would be a total non-reusable waste of effort.

(Well, the mad NDA idea also satisfies this, but good grief, are there really free software projects which take that attitude? That's madder than I've ever heard of!)

Not for any sensible values of free. But there are lots of silly values of free. You get it much more in the Java world, :(. I suppose they're taking their lead from Sun.

It's a bit like messages that say "ring me" or people saying "can I ask you a question?"[1] And I suppose I have perpetrated those, or similar to those.

Mainly when I'm not sure if I'm even in the right ballpark; if I don't know if you're interested in a business idea at all, it seems presumptuous to spell out all the details, implying you should read them.

But in actual fact, from the receiving end, some details are a lot better. Give me a one paragraph summary, enough that I have some idea if it's interesting, if I wasn't going to it might grab my attention, and if I'm interested is a place to start, and if I don't, no harm done.

OTOH, some people aren't very good at writing emails :)

[1] I hate that question. It always sounds so serious, and what they're asking normally isn't so much after all. A good phrase is "Can I ask you something a bit cheeky" to which my reply is "Sure," -- if it's too personal I'll bow out later, but don't terrify me first :)

My favourite variation is, "Can I ask you a personal question?"

Which, I now realise, isn't even that helpful, given that a "personal question" could be anything from "what's your first name" over "Do you realise that the spot on your forehead which you've half-covered with make-up is spectacularly ugly and visible from Outer Space?" to "What's your weight and bra size, and do you shave your pubic hair?".

Yeah. Though actually, that seems ok. Its purpose is really to warn that you know what you're saying is pushing the boundaries a bit, and to say that if they other person feels uncomfortable they should ignore it and you apologise for bringing it up.

Oh, I'm terrible for "can I ask you something?" "can I talk to you?" and all variants thereof. I blame it on being scared of approaching people when I was younger - when I ask one of those non-questions, what I'm really saying is "please let me know whether you are scary/hate me before I attempt to interact with you in any depth?" and I'm very grateful when people realise as much and offer me the necessary affirmation before I go on.

But I suppose it is a bit odd in a business context, yes.

It's not so much the business context as the email context that puzzled me. Starting an in-person conversation with one of those "can I" questions costs at most twenty seconds, so if it helps you feel less nervous it's easy to see it as twenty seconds well spent. But do the same thing at the start of an email conversation and it might be days before I remember to reply to you!

(Not you, that is. I'd hope that if you emailed me I'd reply more promptly than that. But if you were someone I'd never heard of, it would depend entirely on how busy I was.)

Is that basis the website advertising or the feature adding?

If I wake up at 4am and am not nodding off by 5am or so I get up and start doing stuff. I don't normally suffer too much for that.

Sorry, that was probably unclear. "we can't reject them on that basis" == "we can't reject them on the basis that they mention a business proposition and hence mean advertising", because they might turn out not to mean that.

Aha, thanks. That seems sensible.

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