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Excellent suggestions. I've had similar problems with exchanges on online forums. Several years ago, I was helping a friend who was a software developer by running interference on a forum for his product, handling simple questions and issues and sending the more complex ones to his developers. This was strictly volunteer work. One particularly nasty problem resulted in a friendly exchange between me and a customer. After I tried everything I could think of, I told him that he needed help that was beyond my experience and I recommended that he contact support directly.

A few months later, I made a positive comment about my friend's software on a general forum and this customer with whom I had worked chimed in and read me the riot act. I "didn't do this" and "should have done that" and the software sucked and the support sucked, etc. I asked him if he had contacted support and he said that he expected that I would, despite the fact that I was quite explicit about him contacting support on his own. This was because support would have to have an exchange with him with questions, possibly sample data, etc. and it wasn't really an effective approach to have me as a go-between.

To make this long story short, the exchange became very heated and I got caught up in it. Nasty things were said and it took several hours of back and forth along with comments from other forum members supporting either him or me for it to end. And I felt terrible for letting it happen.

Since then I decided to follow advice similar to yours that I found online to defuse such situations, including not responding right away, "putting the person in his place" in an offline message that was deleted before sending and doing my best to put myself in his shoes when crafting the real response. If it's just a non-personal exchange (along the lines of Apple fanboys vs Windows fanboys) and I feel compelled to respond, many times the "putting him in his place" offline e-mail gets it completely out of my system and I never respond at all.

Again, excellent advice... thanks for sharing it!

As an occasional newspaper contributor, I received a number of hostile-sounding emails. My approach was to find the element of truth in the message, and respond to that. Most people have a message that is the truth according to their perception, however buried that truth may be in venom and/or poor expression.

If the writer's perception is out of line with objective reality, respond to the perception first, then seek to reset their point of view to a true reality.

The advice above is great. The best way to start my response is "Thank you for bringing your concern/frustration/experience to our attention." Then it's easy to follow through on that line of thought to "We'd like to find a way to remedy this situation..." Nine times out of ten, this starts me off on the right process, and we often get to a really positive situation. In any case, it rarely gets worse, as long as we address their concerns thoughtfully and truthfully.

Being truthful includes "Thank you making us aware of this bug." Being HONEST about things like bugs is valued by clients. Then we can ask details, find out more, and fix the situation.

Heated, ill-considered emails and blog postings outlast your next four cars.