May I email you about X?
PrevNode LinkNextWhile the amount of emails that I receive is not overwhelming (yet), I still find that people are sending me some emails that could be written better. Here are a few guidelines for when not to send me emails:
If the email to which you are replying was sent by me to a mailing list, please reply to the list. From my experience, most E-mails that are sent to me in private as replies to mailing list posts, were intended to be public, and were sent in private by mistake or due to a user-interface issue.
If you do want to send me a private E-mail to a mailing list post, please explicitly note that the E-mail was intentionally sent in private, and detail the reason for it, and whether or not I can reply in public.
Please don’t send me a “Can you teach me how to become a hacker?” or “Teach me programming / software development” emails. See my How Can I Start Contributing to Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) essay instead.
Please don’t send me emails, trying to interest me in contributing to an open-source project for free, a pro-bono commission, or anything else that doesn’t involve payment. I follow my own interests and don’t work for free.Reconsidering this: you may opt to interest me in contributing to an open-source project, which you believe I may find of interest.If you have an online or offline publication, and can pay me for the trouble of writing an article, then feel free to inform me about it. Other possible commissions such as book reviews are also appropriate.
Please don’t send me emails with technical questions about open source projects or other general knowledge-and-experience questions that other people may be able to answer. I maintain a document explaining how to get help on the Internet and you should refer to it for general enlightenment.
An exception to this rule, may be questions about projects that I personally created or maintain.