Dear correspondent

Unlike Donald Knuth, I still have email addresses and I still value them.

I get a lot of emails (and other electronic messages) and it is not practical for me to answer all of them instantly or even to read all of them instantly.

I use the guidelines below to prioritise messages for earlier or later reading and response, so please read them to ensure that your message does not drop to the end of a very long queue.

If you need me urgently, then please telephone me on +353 87 2547230, at any time that might be considered reasonable for a night owl based in the Irish time zone.  I am very old-fashioned and still answer my telephone when it rings, as long as I am not in company or driving (and the latter only because my current car is even more old-fashioned than me and does not have a working or repairable handsfree telephone system). Hence, it is not necessary to make an appointment before telephoning me. In fact, I consider emails,SMS text messages, etc., requesting permission or appointments to telephone me to be much more intrusive than a telephone call. If it is cheaper for you, then you can call using Viber or WhatsApp. If I don't answer when you telephone, then just try again later. I do not use voicemail as several of my regular callers do not understand how to use it and were prone to leaving messages consisting of several minutes of silence or background noise.

I understand that others will likewise not always find it practical to answer my emails or telephone calls instantly. Please do not waste both of our time by replying to my email merely to tell me that you will reply to it more fully later.

I am trying hard to keep all my email addresses spam-free and virus-free.  For this and a variety of other reasons, I no longer have email addresses at tcd.ie, upenn.edu, lbs.lon.ac.uk, vodafone.ie, doonbeggolfclub.com, hotmail.co.uk, csi.com or compuserve.com.

Please help me (and all your other correspondents) to achieve my objective, in particular:

• if you are not happy that you have appropriate anti-virus defences in place, then please delete all emails from me immediately and please do not store my email address in any electronic address book or other electronic form;
• please do not email me asking me to confirm my birthdate or any other such information known to my email provider and hence to anyone who has my email password;
  
• please be aware of the difference between "reply-to-all" and "reply-to-sender" and the difference between "Bcc:" and "Cc:";
• please use the "reply-to-sender" command in your email software, which is almost always sufficient, rather than "reply-to-all";
• please use "Bcc:", which is almost always sufficient, rather than "Cc:";
• please do not send emails to more than one of my email addresses;
  
• please do not publish my email address on any web page, news group, chat room, etc.;
• please do not give my email address to any commercial organisation whatsoever;
• please do not enter my email address in any web-based form, especially those enticing you to "refer-a-friend", "tell-a-friend" etc;
• please do not give my email address to any other individual without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on that individual;
• please do not forward chain letters, jokes, virus hoaxes, vaccine hoaxes, political propaganda, or similar nuisances to my email address;
• please do not use email to circulate very large files, such as large collections of high-resolution photographs, as this may cause delivery not only of your message but of other more urgent messages to be delayed;
• please do not open links or attachments in emails unless you are certain that they are genuine;
• please do not email me about lost or forgotten passwords for my website or other websites; and
• please note that Microsoft software is particularly subject to virus attack - see http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html.

Also, please note that I use Mozilla Thunderbird on a device with a full-size keyboard to manage all my correspondence, so

• please do not send me SMS text messages (except to request my email address), as I do not know how to redirect them to Mozilla Thunderbird and by 2022 my then provider had withdrawn its former facility to send SMS text messages from devices with full-size keyboards;
• please do not send me Facebook messages (except to request my email address), as I do not know how to redirect them to Mozilla Thunderbird; and
• please do not send me WhatsApp messages (except to request my email address), as I do not know how to redirect them to Mozilla Thunderbird.

I greatly regret that the enormous potential of email and the Internet has been destroyed by spammers and the creators of viruses. I especially regret that I allowed my own previous email addresses and possibly even others' addresses to get into the wrong hands.

Thank you for your cooperation

Paddy Waldron

Last updated: 12 August 2022.

First published: 18 October 2013