{"schemaVersion":"1.0","type":"Article","types":["Article"],"slug":"two-letters-to-spanish-sites-waited-three-weeks-in-english-caught-by-reading-one-the-evening-before-one-three-hours-before-sending-now-each-letter-declares-its-language-and-a-check-reads-it-7b0xj","url":"https://zyvop.com/two-letters-to-spanish-sites-waited-three-weeks-in-english-caught-by-reading-one-the-evening-before-one-three-hours-before-sending-now-each-letter-declares-its-language-and-a-check-reads-it-7b0xj","title":"Two letters to Spanish sites waited three weeks in English, caught by reading, one the evening before, one three hours before sending. Now each letter declares its language and a check reads it","subtitle":null,"tldr":"I send one letter a day, at most, to a site that has written about the category my extension belongs to and could use a measurement of mine.","keywords":[],"entities":["Mathieu Ades","Founder","ZyVOP"],"keyTakeaways":["I send one letter a day, at most, to a site that has written about the category my extension belongs to and could use a measurement of mine.","Each letter is a file, written when the site is vetted, and dated for a slot in a queue that runs one recipient a day.","Between the writing and the slot there are usually two or three weeks, and the file waits."],"headings":["Two catches, neither by a tool","What the check needed first","The tool that was not listening","The general shape","Disclosure"],"outboundLinks":[],"contentText":"I send one letter a day, at most, to a site that has written about the category my extension belongs to and could use a measurement of mine. Each letter is a file, written when the site is vetted, and dated for a slot in a queue that runs one recipient a day. Between the writing and the slot there are usually two or three weeks, and the file waits. In late August I vetted two Spanish sites on the same morning and wrote both letters in English, because that is the language I think in and the language of the measurements I was offering. The queue put them three weeks out. Two other letters written that week, to a Spanish site and a Brazilian one, had been translated before they went, and they went fine. These two I simply forgot. Two catches, neither by a tool The first was caught the evening before its slot, during the reading I do of everything that goes out the next day. The letter was in English; the site was not. I translated it that night, same facts, same link, same disclosure in the second paragraph, and it went at nine the next morning in Spanish. The second was caught three hours before its slot, when I opened the file to check that it carried the recipient line my sending tool now refuses to go without. It did not carry the line, and it was in English. Both fixed by half past six, sent at nine. Two catches, one day apart, same fault, same morning of origin, and in both cases the thing that caught it was me reading the file. Nothing in the loop had an opinion about what language a letter was in. The vetting knew the site's language, the file did not say it, and the checks read prices, competitor names, dashes and the disclosure sentence, in whatever language they were written. What the check needed first A tool cannot check a letter against the language of its recipient unless something tells it that language. So the fix has two halves and the first is a declaration: every letter file now carries a line naming the language it should be in, two letters, written at vetting time when the site's language is in front of me. The second half is the count. The reading tool takes the body of the letter, counts the small words, the articles and conjunctions and prepositions that every language uses constantly and none shares, in nine languages, and names the language with the most hits. If that is not the declared one, the letter fails, and a failed letter does not send. I tested it with the one file I had that should fail: the English original of the second letter, with a line declaring Spanish. Refused, with the sentence \"the letter is not in the language of the site\". Then the four letters waiting in the queue, in Spanish, Indonesian, Polish and English, each declared: all four pass. The tool that was not listening There was a third thing wrong, which I only saw while wiring the second. The sending tool had its own four checks, written on the day it was born: no dashes, no competitor named, one price at most, an address that looks like one. It had never called the reading tool, which by now checks a dozen other things, including the disclosure, the dated words, the limit attributed to the wrong author, and, since the fix above, the language. So every improvement to the reading tool over the past month had applied to articles and to letters read by hand, and to no letter at the moment of sending. The sending tool now runs the reading tool on the file and treats each of its problems as a refusal. Same witness: refused. Same four letters: pass. The general shape A property nobody has written down cannot be checked, however obvious it is to the person who knows it. The language of a letter was obvious at vetting time and invisible three weeks later, because the only place it lived was in my head. Writing it into the file is what makes a check possible, and the check is then simple. And a tool that reads is only useful to a tool that acts if the second calls the first; otherwise every lesson the reader learns stays with the reader, and the act goes out with the checks it had on its first day. Disclosure I build BlueTicks for Gmail, a Chrome and Firefox extension that shows WhatsApp style ticks in your Gmail sent list, one tick sent and two blue ticks opened. It costs 4 dollars a year, and the free tier covers 30 emails a month. Everything above comes from distributing it in public, one letter a day, in the language of whoever receives it. You can find it at blueticks.io.","contentHash":"sha256:19f7473b07f2e09b31f5a711cedf3de2e3e95519ddaa057a08139b1ab857a333","authorName":"Mathieu Ades","authorUrl":"https://zyvop.com/author/mathieu","authorSameAs":["https://blueticks.io/"],"category":null,"tags":[],"audience":"Technical professionals and readers researching software development","tone":"Professional, founder perspective","readingTimeMinutes":4,"wordCount":823,"faqs":null,"primaryTopic":null,"publishedAt":"2026-09-26T22:11:52.721Z","updatedAt":"2026-09-26T22:11:52.721Z","canonicalUrl":"https://zyvop.com/two-letters-to-spanish-sites-waited-three-weeks-in-english-caught-by-reading-one-the-evening-before-one-three-hours-before-sending-now-each-letter-declares-its-language-and-a-check-reads-it-7b0xj"}