Legible email errors

Email. Sources say it was invented as early as 1973. Regardless of its exact birthdate, it has changed significantly since its initial conception and implementation. What hasn’t changed, sadly, in over eighteen years: what happens when you send an email and something goes wrong.

I still occasionally get asked by family members what this cryptic email means that they got back from ‘postmaster’ at some complex, two-hundred character server address with many dots and technical terms in it, followed by a cryptic cascade of error codes and technicalities.

Computers are becoming appliances. They should talk to us in our language, not force us to learn theirs. I wish email clients showed us errors in a sane way: namely, compatible with humans.