Contacting the Author

There are two ways to contact me:

You used also to be able to contact me at two Fidonet "point" addresses that were assigned to me:

Alas, the person who ran one of the nodes that I pointed off died, and I lost an entire hard disc's worth of setup and messagebase information for the other some years ago.

But it's worth noting that my accessibility via Fidonet mail actually outlasted my accessibility via Internet mail.

Contacting me via SMTP-based Internet electronic mail

After the events described in Holy Deluge of Microsoft Worms, Batman!, I gave up on SMTP-based Internet electronic mail as a bad job that is no longer worth the time and effort.

The price for contributing to technical discussions and providing help to thousands of people is to become buried under a mountain of electronic rubbish. Be warned by the voice of experience.

People often read this and take it upon themselves to suggest strategems to me for combatting the problem. They fail to take into account the fact that I've long since tried all of these strategems and found that they don't work in the long term. I've been there, and done that, years ago — decades in some cases.

The simple truth is that no anti-UBM measure for SMTP-based Internet mail works, and where I am now is where you will eventually end up, one day, when you've been using mail systems and Usenet for as long as I have. One day you too will realize that the entire mechanism is biased in the UBM senders' favour, and all that you'll ever be doing is playing an ever-more-difficult game of catch-up, that you pay for. As I wrote here back in 2004:

I refuse to spend any more of my time and my money making my mailbox accessible by setting up ever-more convoluted schemes to sift through it. Enough is enough!

You can try to send SMTP-based Internet electronic mail to J.deBoynePollard-newsgroups@NTLWorld.com if you like. It may work from time to time. But you do so with the full foreknowledge that for reasons not of my making there's no guarantee whatsoever that your mail will be read, be seen, or even reach my mailbox in the first place, and a high probability that it will not.

Contacting me via IM2000 Internet electronic mail

I'm backing the creation and the adoption of a new Internet mail system, IM2000, that doesn't suffer from the problem of unsolicited bulk mail. I've fleshed out the concept so that it is implementable and I'm implementing it for myself by writing some softwares. When I manage to set up reasonably permanent recipient notification agents and message stores for my mail, I'm going to switch to it completely and not look back.

Don't say that I didn't warn you right from the start.


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