Please note the following before you email me (or forever hold your peace):
I don't have much time for replying to emails, so please forgive me if I never reply to your email, or if I take weeks, months, or in some cases even years to reply! Don't worry if you emailed me at one of my previous addresses - I saved all the emails to reply to in a special file that I took with me when I left university (ditto re. AOL), and I am making a slow but systematic attempt to clear the backlog (which dates back to May 2000). But I regret that I cannot reply to every email, and to be honest, the longer I haven't replied to an email, the less likely it is that I ever will. It's nothing personal - I'm just extremely busy.
Emails can get 'lost in the post', so if you send me an email and don't get a reply, it's possible that I might not have received it (although far more likely that I haven't got round to it yet). By the same token, my reply might fail to get through to you. If it was an important email (such as a long, personal message), you could always try sending it again.
If you emailed me at my cs.man.ac.uk address after July 2003, or at my aol.com address after January 2004, I probably won't have received it.
Please make it clear what you are writing about. I have a large website with many sections, and some emails don't make it clear which one they pertain to.
Please do not give your email a vague, generic Subject such as "Urgent - please read" or a blank Subject, as I get many such emails, and I tend to delete them as spam without even opening them.
Please do not ask me to tell you a tennis-player's email-address. I don't know their email-addresses, and I wouldn't be at liberty to divulge this information if I did.
If you tell me something interesting, I might add the information to my website. If I do, I will acknowledge you fully by giving your name and email-address (if you have a website, I will link to it instead of giving your email-address). If you're telling me something you don't want made public, if you don't want me to give out your email-address, or if you would prefer to remain anonymous (or to be acknowledged under a pseudonym), then please tell me so in your first email, and the appropriate confidentiality will be assured. It is not necessary to ask me not to give out your name or email-address if you're merely asking a question without giving me any information.
Please do not send attachments that would make the total size of your email-message larger than 10 megabytes. Any email larger than 10 megabytes will be automatically rejected by my email-account (I have no control over this limit). Please note that any files you attach will increase in size by about 33% (multiply by 1.333...) due to encoding, and it is the encoded size that counts towards the 10-megabyte limit.
Please do not pass on my email-address directly - always pass on a link to my website instead.
My current email-address is:
(The use of a handwritten image is to thwart any spam-harvesting programs that might visit my website - you'll have to type it by hand.)
