When a user responds by email to a thread that has been closed in the meantime, he receives an email stating his post could not be posted.
However, unlike SMTP bounces, the body of his post is discarded.
He might have spent hours composing it, but now he cannot even access it.
Sure, he should have saved a copy, but it might be on the desktop back at his mother’s house, and now he is on an airplane.
And he might not have been using Gmail, etc., so there is no online “Sent” folder to check.
Just like when one does a bank transfer and
Sorry, your transfer failed
Well, OK, but can I at least have my money back? You can keep the service fee, fine with me.
Sorry.
Just like today, when I’m typing this into the Discourse web interface. I shouldn’t need to always make my own copy of what I wrote before I click “+ Create Topic”…
So, what might a user want to do with his failed post?
Well, he might want to take some lines from the song he composed and integrate them into a new song and post it somewhere else.
Or that nice proof of e=mc2, he might not be in the mood to type it all over again when posting it to a different thread, etc.
Edit: wow I started tying to update the gender non-neutrality of my post, and found it was no simple job. Even with query replace!