Contact Information

Before You Email Me
Hotmail Users
AOL Users
Contact Information

Before You Email Me

Please be considerate, and understand RFC 1855 before corresponding with me electronically, (RFC 3676 might also be helpful). In theory, your MUA should handle some of this for you, but unfortunately, most email clients are broken (poorly programmed). If you have difficulty reaching me, please use a different address. In addition, the following is requested:

Make sure the time is set properly on your computer
When you quote text, please use a quotation style that is readable. Anything that is not plain ascii text, or format=fixed requires the use of ‘>’ for quotes. Also, please fix your MUA if your delimiter has spaces: you should have ‘>>> ’ not ‘> > > ’ (note the space after the delimeters).
Include full URL schemes, as in <http://www.deevans.net> not www.deevans.net (see RFC 1738). This is to prevent a line break when clicking, or copying, the URL into a web browser. Note that some clients add a URL with paranthesis, or even worse _URL_ followed by (URL). This is not helpful.
Please read and consider the information on this page: <http://www.expita.com/nomime.html>
If you have no option but to send via MIME (ie no plain text), use format=fixed, or quoted-printable. If you can avoid using MIME entirely, and can send pure ansi text, that is preferred. uuencoded attachments are OK.
Don't send me Microsoft Word or PowerPoint attachments. I have a MSWord conversion program, but it doesn't work with OOXML, nor does it deal with forms or macros. Microsoft Office programs are typically proprietary: I do not have a license to Microsoft products, nor will I support their freedom restricting formats.
Please do not top post (see below)

I recently enjoyed this illustrative signature from a mailing list:

A: Because it messes up the order in which people read text.
Q: Why does top-posting make it difficult?
A: Top-posting.
Q: What is something that makes email communication difficult?

Hotmail Users

If you are a Hotmail user, and don't know how to send me a text email, please use the following instructions:

Under Compose, click on Tools
Select Rich-text editor OFF from the toggle menu
Click OK to Are you sure you want to do this? (The HTML formatting tools should disappear.)
As an alternate, to avoid the above hastle, don't use IE. It is Internet Explorer that allows this feature to function. If you use Firefox, for instance, your email will automatically send as plain text

Aol Users

If you use AOL, version 6 and above, you do not have the capability of controlling the format of text emails. The instructions on AOL's website to resolve this in most cases do not work, referring to capabilities that do not exist. AOL sends HTML emails in a text (non-binary) quoted-printable form, but requires their rich-text HTML, and text alternatives, to be interpreted by the email client. The text portion of this multipart/alternative, quoted-printable encoding is converted from the HTML without formatting the quoted-printable, or other rich text interpreted, encoding; this will most likely make the formatting of the email unreadable, unless using an AOL client (such as Netscape Mail). I won't spend extra time to decipher emails you send this way.

If you use AOL 4 or 5, you can modify it to use plain text without MIME, or rich text encoding. I also understand that AOL's webmail is able to be configured to use text, instead of rich text.