Do these people know how to read?

[darkrosetiger.livejournal.com]

It never fails: faculty sign up for a class mailing list. When the list is created, they get a message saying, "You may start posting messages to your list after 8am tomorrow."

So what do they do? They email the help desk, of course, demanding to know why the message they just tried to post bounced. Frequently, they do a straight reply to the original message that told them when they could start posting.

This is one time i wish we didn't use Pine to do email support, so that I could reply and just put in bold, maybe in red the part that says "You may start posting messages to your list after 8am tomorrow."

Comments

[jecook]

Wash the text through something like figlet. :)

[shirenomad]

Try all caps. They don't seem to understand those strange shapes you call "lowercase letters."

[brothersterno.livejournal.com]

Isnt't ther color options somewhere in Pine? I'm pretty sure there are, but I also think those are luser defined. You could always just sudo their pine config and set a flag for yellow letters or something, and just use that. Of course, that's not really ethical, but I won't tell anyone, I promise.

[the-s-guy.livejournal.com]

Meh. Auto-bounce with the added text "Our original message (which you have attached to your email) states the date the service will start working. Please find that date now and mark it on your calendar."

Which would come out like this:

[jecook]

-bash-2.05b$ cat figlet |figlet
  __ _       _      _   
 / _(_) __ _| | ___| |_ 
| |_| |/ _` | |/ _ \ __|
|  _| | (_| | |  __/ |_ 
|_| |_|\__, |_|\___|\__|
       |___/       

[kait-the-great.livejournal.com]

props to pine users!