Contacting me by email

Naturally you could just click the link below and send me an email, but unless you honour some well-established conventions from the happy days before Bill Gates heard about the Internet your chances of getting a reply are pretty slim. It's really sad one has to list these things which used to go without saying...

• Do NOT send HTML or Text+HTML encoded mails, these go straight into my trash folder. Write normal ASCII text.
• Do NOT use top- or bottom quoting as it's idiotic for many reasons. Do use quoting, that's one of the major advantages of email compared to paper, but choose traditional quoting: use a normal > character for quoting, cut the text you're not referring to and write your reply right below the paragraph the reply refers to. More on quoting can be found here.
• Do NOT use soft linewrapping which ends up as one line per paragraph in standard ASCII terminals, which is extremely annoying and makes decent quoting laborous. Netiquette demands that lines should not exceed 80 chars (actually less to account for a couple of levels quoting depth).
• Do NOT send attachments unless I explicitly asked you to first (people I have regular correspondence with are exempt from this rule). If you violate this rule I might feel inclined to send you a coredump and that might hurt my online bill less than it does yours.
• Do NOT ask me questions in any way related to Windows, in particular Windows binaries. I don't do Windows and I don't want to be bothered with this sorry excuse for an operating system. You're welcome to ask me questions about RISC OS or Linux, though.
• If you want to draw my attention to a website, send me the link only. Do NOT attach the website to your email.
• If you send me a file as an attachment, do NOT use a proprietary file format such as Word or PowerPoint; use an open format such as PDF, LaTeX, PNG, JPEG etc. If you don't know how to create these, learn some elementary computer basics first.
• No, I'm not interested in hot young teens, having a penis enlargement, reducing my weight, getting out of debt quick or lending money to whatever tribe which'll get the oil concession next month either. How stupid do you think I am?

Due to the recent virus mailbombings, I will no longer put my email address in a machine-readable form on my website or any other part of the public internet. I'm sorry for the inconvenience, but given the choice between getting 100MB of virus spam a day and forcing people to type in my address manually, it's fingers-to-the-keyboard time for you. If you have a problem with that, complain to Microsoft, whose insecure software and retarded users are responsible for this unfortunate turn of events.

So here goes (OK, it's not pretty, but so what...?)