Privacy: I consider unencrypted email/chat to be the electronic equivalent of a postcard. If you send me unencrypted email, please keep the content at a level appropriate for a postcard. If you wish to send me private letters, click on the "letter" link below to learn how.

Format: My preferred format for email is plain text. Please don't use all capital letters, I am not deaf yet.

Attachments: Please use a portable format for non-text files. That usually means avoiding Microsoft-specific formats like doc, pps, wma, wmv, etc. Amazingly, some people use other operating systems than Windows.

Before clicking on that send key, please ask yourself: is attaching an obese Word file really necessary or would plain text suffice? Consider this fair warning: with nonzero probability, I will ignore anything in non-portable formats.

Mass mailings:

• Send the message to yourself and put the real recipient list into the Bcc: field of your message. Some people prefer not to have their email address distributed to all the members of the list.

• Consider whether it's more approriate to place a non-text file on the web and to distribute a link rather than the file itself.

Spammers: I am not interested in receiving unsolicited commercial email. Please take me off your lists. I will not open your messages. The best you can hope for is that you will manage to get through my spam filter and will have a brief encounter with my delete key.

I bet you all sleep like babies. You may not believe in karma, but it believes in you.