Tim Craven - E-mail

You can e-mail me brief messages (< 64 KB) at craven@uwo.ca. This is my address on the University of Western Ontario e-mail server. I will be checking this mailbox occasionally, perhaps once a week.

The following are some guidelines for sending e-mail to me. Most will likely be obvious to anyone with a reasonable familiarity with e-mail etiquette, but you may notice one or two points that you had not thought of. The list is based on my actual observation of messages sent to me in recent years as well as some information from the University's Information Technology Services.

• Do not use an e-mail service that is on a blacklist. If you do, your messages will be discarded (not bounced) by the University's spam service. Note that the composition of blacklists changes frequently.
• Know the policies of your e-mail service. Make sure that your messages will not be rejected because of the type or length of attachments or because you have exceeded your quota.
• Make sure that you are sending your message to the right person (e.g., for communications to the Faculty of Information and Media Studies and to faculty authorized to supervise research, use the links provided for that purpose at http://www.fims.uwo.ca/).
• Make requests for information reasonable.
• Send messages that do not look like spam.
  1. Configure your e-mail properly. The from field should match where you are actually sending the mail from.
  2. If you are someone that I know, use your real given name and surname in the from (sender) field if possible (e.g, "Jennifer Smith", not "Jennifer" or "Smith" or "XYZ0123ABCD@aol.com"). You can also use just your e-mail address if I know your user name.
  3. Include a specific and clearly relevant subject line (e.g., "TheW32 - Question about printing", not "I just had a thought" or "It's me again"). (This is especially recommended if point 1 above does not apply.)
  4. Do not include strings of arbitrary characters in your subject line. Avoid using products like Microsoft CRM that do this automatically.
  5. Use standard modern English. Avoid misspellings.
  6. Make sure the body of your message contains some substantial text. Do not create messages with attachments but no bodies; configure your e-mail client appropriately. The content type should not be "multipart/alternative".
  7. Do not use HTML tags in the body of the message. The content type should not be "text/html".
  8. Do not assign a priority (such as "Urgent") to the message.
  9. Avoid e-mail services that append advertisements to your e-mail.
  10. Avoid excessive quoting of previous messages.
  11. Do not sort multiple recipients by email address.
  (E-mail messages that look too much like spam are automatically flagged by SpamAssassin on the University's e-mail server and may also be flagged by other software, such as MIMEDefang; messages flagged by SpamAssassin are discarded automatically before they even reach my in box; I also delete unread other massages that appear to the spam from their subject lines.)
• Be careful about attachments
  • Avoid sending unformatted plain text as an attachment.
  • Do not include unnecessary attachments (e.g., attachments that simply repeat the words of the main message).
  • Do not send executable files as normal attachments. Attachments with extensions indicating they might be executable are removed by the University's mail server. If you really need to send a blocked type of file, change the extension of that file to something innocuous-looking (like .zzz), and let me know in the main text what type of file you are attaching.
  • Although HTML attachments are not blocked, they may be mangled by the University's Web mail service.
  • For non-executable attachments, avoid proprietary or obscure formats and use appropriate extensions.
• Do not send messages that are too long (messages longer than 64 KB will normally be automatically discarded; contact me first if you think you really need to exceed this limit).
• Note that e-mail messages are not secure. So, absolute confidentiality cannot be guaranteed.

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Last updated August 24, 2010, by Tim Craven