congratulations, you're missing the point completely. I'm discussing this as the feature in a program for using IRC that it is, not as the feature you know it really it.

In any user-oriented program, which would most definitely include mIRC, it is good practice to let the user know that something went wrong in a way that informs them what to do next. just beeping and moving the cursor does not tell you why what you did was wrong, it only tells you that it was wrong. for useroriented software, that's not good practice.

Also, if the email is required because it is "essential" to the identd server built into mirc, then it should be listed as part of settings for mirc's identd system, not as a field called "email" with seemingly no relation to anything else. again, it's just poorly placed.

improving it would be trivial; a simple label text that tells users what still needs to be filled out before they can click OK on their settings for instance, or a pop up dialog when a user tries to commit his or her settings with the email field missing - and yeah, I agree with you argv0 that a simple rename of the field would probably do it, but you cannot raise the "people will get used to it" argument: this is an error you run in the very first time you use mirc, thus making it an error that can determine whether people even start using mirc or not (if the program throws up silent errors the first time it's tried, many people will not bother with it again).