Sending mail to me

I'm fed up with receiving junk email. Junk email is anything that falls roughly into the following categories:

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:

Tips for securing your own email