There are three ways to contact me:
If you wish to talk about the development of my OS/2 softwares, do not contact me directly. Use the discussion fora that are provided for that purpose.
I've given up on SMTP-based Internet electronic mail as a bad job that is no longer worth the time and effort.
It turns out that the price for my posting to Usenet for these many years is to suffer a deluge of Microsoft Worms. Contribute to technical discussions and provide help to thousands of people; become buried under a mountain of electronic rubbish.
(There's irony here. I originally published my mailbox on this page some years ago with a warning notice to the effect that since this mailbox is hosted by one of the U.K.'s "free" ISPs, a side business of one of the country's supermarkets, it is subject to the standard "use every 90 days or it will be deleted" condition that such ISPs impose, and could thus go away at any time. In all of the years since, this never actually happened. It's the fact that I've kept my published mailbox name so stable for all of these years that has resulted in it being the target for so many Microsoft Worms and so much other junk electronic mail.)
And that's aside from the ubiquitous low-level roar of the other junk mail that I receive, largely (and deliberately, on the part of those who send it) indistinguishable, until I read the actual message content, from mail that I get from my family, friends, and acquaintances.
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@tesco.net if you like. It may work from time to time. But you do so in the knowledge
that thanks to
all of the thousands of unknown people around the world who are using badly designed Microsoft softwares on their machines and are infected by the W32/Swen@mm and W32/Mydoom@mm Microsoft Worms (and any of the Microsoft Worms that will follow them)
and
all of the thousands of shysters, scammers, con artists, and crooks who have harvested my mailbox names from Usenet and elsewhere and who stupidly send me their adverts for their purported products and services, which I have no interest in, with misleading subject lines and sender names,
both that mailbox and any other SMTP-based Internet mailbox that I use publically are being and will be sent gigabinarybytes of junk per day, as a consequence of the actions that I have no control over of thousands of other people around the world;
that I'm simply not going to spend large swathes of my time and my money trying to clear this junk out of my mailbox as quickly as yet more of it is sent, any longer;
that your mail will be hidden amongst a welter of junk disguised as messages from people that I know, in any case;
that, therefore, sending SMTP-based Internet electronic mail to me probably will simply not work at all for significant fractions of the time, because it will bounce, unread, as a result of my mailbox being full;
and
that, therefore, even where sending your mail does work, your messages will probably be deleted unread by accident as I delete the adverts that pretend to be mail to me from people that I know.
Those of you who employ challenge-response schemes for verifying senders should also note that your challenges won't actually reach me (unless you happen to be very lucky) and you will have rendered yourself incommunicado as far as I am concerned.
If you are serious about contacting me, then I suggest that you switch from SMTP-based Internet electronic mail to IM2000 Internet electronic mail.
Who would have thought that my accessibility via Fidonet mail would actually outlast my accessibility via Internet mail, eh? But it has.
Fidonet netmail still reaches me without problems. I still have my system poll, albeit at irregular intervals, for it.
Fidonet netmail can be addressed to either of my two permanent "point" addresses:
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.