Sending mail to me
I'm fed up with receiving junk email. Junk email is anything that
falls roughly into the following categories:
- Unsolicited commercial email
- "Make Money FA$T" messages and other scams
- Invitations to join "private" mailing lists (usually of some
dubious or pointless nature)
- Announcements of pornographic or other time-wasting WWW sites
- Solicitations for money, gifts, postcards, chain letters and so
forth
- ANY kind of chain letter
- ANY religous or pseudo-spritual message
- "Announcements" of miracle healing drugs, the Fountain of Youth or
other quack nostrums
- Announcements of commercial bulk email services (this one really
adds insult to injury)
- Survey questionnaires
As a general rule, if someone I don't know sends me an unsolicited
email about something I have no interest in, they probably shouldn't
have sent it in the first place.
Stuff that I am interested in includes
Linux,
astronomical visualisation,
electronic engineering, art, music, fine food and science. I get quite
a few questions about Linux in
particular, and that's OK, but please note that I'm very busy and it
may take me a long time to answer your email. Since I get a lot of
Linux-related questions, I don't have the time to answer basic
questions. Sorry, but I need to focus on parts of the system that I
wrote or support. And I need get on with future development. So if I
get a question that you could get answered from one of the newsgroups,
chat rooms, mailing lists, FAQs, HOWTOs or other documentation, I'll
just delete it and move on. Always do a
Google search before asking me
a question. Oh, yes, and I can smell "homework" questions from afar,
so don't even try.
To cope with the flood of junk email, I've set up automatic mail
filtering which discards messages from people I don't know, sending
back an automatic reply with instructions on how to get past the
filter. This
filter
is based on one written by
Lars Wirzenius, although I've
done some further modifications (I've made it meaner). I have also
developed other email filtering software that
gives an email administrator more control over their email servers.
To all those people who don't abuse the Internet, I apologise for
making it harder to contact me, but I'm wasting an increasing amount
of time deleting junk email.
Notes to mailing list subscribers who receive bounce messages from
me
If you receive a bounce message as a result of sending a message to a
legitimate mailing list that you are subscribed to, there are three
possibilities:
- I explicitly subscribed to the mailing list, and screwed up my
mail filter configuration. If this is the case, I apologise,
and if you send me a complete copy of the bounce message, I
will fix it promptly
- I explicitly subscribed to the mailing list, and the mailing list
administrators have changed the configuration, which has confused my
mail filter. Send me a complete copy of the bounce message and
I will update my filter promptly. If you are seeking an apology, go to
the mailing list administrators, since they should have sent an
announcement first before making changes
- I have been subscribed to the mailing list without my explicit
consent. I will take no action in this case. I realise
receiving bounce messages is annoying when you have done nothing
wrong, and I sympathise, but it is the responsibility of the person
who subscribed me without my consent, and/or the mailing list
administrator, to unsubscribe me from the list.
Tips for securing your own email