As a user, always choose the English language

I always make a point of using an application or a website in English. This helps getting the “real” experience, as the developers intended it, and avoid crappy translations. I don’t go as far as changing the local settings of my machine, though I do remember one instance where a Java application running on a Swedish PC was failing, while it was working smoothly on British PCs (since the application was to be deployed only on British-based computers, it was not an issue, so we never looked into it).

Just today, my friend Guillaume Tardif was pulling his hair out. He was sending emails with text attachments, and those attachments would never appear in his email client, though they were perfectly visible in the email source.
However, those same emails displayed fine on my email client. And my email client is EXACTLY the same as his (it’s webmail, run by our ISP)!
Fortunately, I had the good luck of thinking about changing his language preferences from French to English, and voila, text attachments visible again!

I checked: there does not seem to be a bug for that recorded in IMP.

Seriously, when you hear about things like that… can you still afford *not* to use a piece of software in English?

Eventually, I logged a bug with free.fr (I cannot do that directly on bugs.horde.org, as I do not even know the version being used). We’ll see.

Update (05/07/06): Free.fr has now fixed the issue! Excellent responsiveness.