1 Sending email to Keith F. Lynch

Sending email to Keith F. Lynch

I always welcome email not just from people who know me, but also from strangers who have read any of my web pages, newsgroup postings, email, letters or articles in fanzines, or other writings. Or who have read or heard anything about me. The only email that is not welcome here is spam (unsolicited bulk email sent to millions of addresses), worms, and viruses.

My current email address is kfl23b@keithlynch.net. Mail to any other address you may have seen on my web site or in a newsgroup posting or email might not reach me, unless you're in my whitelist.

(IMPORTANT: Do NOT use that address to inform me of vast amounts of money that I have won or can get. All email on that topic should go to uce@ftc.gov and, if you're in Nigeria, to 419.fcd@usss.treas.gov.)

Also, do NOT offer to place ads on my site. I'm not interested.

Also, please don't send me any email longer than about 90k.

This address is subject to change with 24 hours' notice. So please don't add it to your address book if you don't intend to email me immediately. Instead, bookmark this web page (http://KeithLynch.net/email.html), and return to it whenever you want to email me. (If you do email me immediately, I'll add you to my whitelist, after which you can reach me on my regular email address, kfl@KeithLynch.net, so long as you keep using the same reply address.)

My whitelist contains over fourteen thousand entries, including the names and email addresses of everyone with whom I have exchanged email in the past several years, everyone who has sent me email on one of my new disposable email addresses, everyone whose newsgroup posting I have replied to in the past several years, everyone who has posted a response to any newsgroup posting of mine in the past several years (unless the first time was within the past few days, in which case I might not have seen it yet), all members of WSFA, PRSFS, DCT, LLG, and LES, everyone in John Lorentz's Fannish Email Directory, and friends, family, coworkers, classmates, and many others.

If you send to the above email address, and your email isn't huge, doesn't have non-text attachments, you're not sending from Argentina, China, Korea, Nigeria, or Taiwan, you don't mention the URL of a website hosted in one of those countries, you don't mention any of several phrases or URLs that frequently appear in spams and almost never appear anywhere else, you don't mention any googlepages.com or geocities.com URLs, and you don't RunMixedCaseWordsTogetherLikeThis, I should get your email, and should respond within a day or two. (Should I list all of the forbidden phrases here?)

I apologize for the necessity of this, but the utterly immense volumes of spam, viruses, worms, and bogus bounce messages that I have been bombarded with -- often many hundreds of thousands of messages per day, some of them more than a megabyte in length -- have precluded the continued use of an unchanging email address that is open to everyone.

This new (as of February 2004) combination of disposable email addresses and whitelisting has finally allowed me to turn off most of the aggressive spam filtering I've been doing for the past three years, other than blocking immense messages. (As of January 2008 I've had to turn much of the filtering back on.)

I can get messages in HTML, though I strongly prefer plain text. Apparently some mailers automatically send HTML email without the sender's knowledge or consent, even though more and more sites are automatically discarding all such email. In general, you should never send HTML email to anyone except by explicit pre-arrangement. Please see http://www.expita.com/nomime.html for instructions on how to turn this misfeature off in your mailer. Thanks.

Once again, I apologize for the necessity of this. But if you let this minor inconvenience stop you from emailing me, then the terrorists spammers will have won.

My past email addresses have included:

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Last updated October 22, 2023. Keith Lynch.