Do you ever get email like this?

This evening, I sat down to check my email and saw a real beauty from someone I'll call Jim. Jim's not a native English speaker, so I'm willing to forgive murky grammar. I'm not so forgiving of the lack of effort on Jim's part before asking for help. Here's what Jim wrote, my comments are inline:

Hi
I am a Jim,a php programmer I am interested to learn ruby and I tried to install it on my system ,ruby(1.8.3) is working now but I want to install rails too ,

Okay, so if you're looking at Rails at all, you should probably know that it's best to use ruby 1.8.4, and version 1.8.3 is right out. At least read the docs before you ask for help.

for that I installed ruby gems 0.8.11 and installed I think .After that I have supplied a command to install rails " gem install rails --include-dependencies". shows Local installation error and trying to remote installation

Have you tried installing anything else? Did that work? Can you show me the actual error you got? This really isn't the kind of bug report/help request that's going to make someone want to help you.

I expect you immediate reply

I hope this is just an English as a second language problem, otherwise it's awfully rude.

thsnks in Advance

The worst part of the whole thing is that Jim emailed me directly, he did not try the Rails list, he did not pass go, he should not collect $200. I'm not even that much of a Rails guy. How did Jim pick my name out of the hat?

If you're having problems with Ruby or Rails, there's a community full of people wou would love to help you — if you'll follow a couple of rules:

• Do your part first; read the docs, think about your problem, and try some diagnostics
• Be clear in your problem description; at least paste in errors and describe your environment.
• Use the mailing lists and/or irc channels. Mailing an individual is the wrong way to go about this.