Sending email to Paul Eggert

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Although the primary method of communication for this class is via Piazza to other students and to the teaching assistants, as well as lectures, discussions and office hours, occasionally you may need to contact me directly via email.

Please send me text mail as plain text. Use a brief, informative Subject: header, so that I can handle your message efficiently. Identify yourself in your From: header; a cryptic header like From: aki5116960@gmail.com won’t do.

Please avoid fancy features like quoted-printable and base-64 encoding, rich text, multipart messages, long signatures, and the like, unless they’re necessary, as they hinder high-volume mail processing. Viruses, spam, and embedded advertisements are never necessary, so don’t send them under any circumstances. Also, please avoid documents in proprietary formats. For example, I don’t use Microsoft PowerPoint, so a presentation that relies on Microsoft-specific features will be problematic for me to decode.

When sending attachments, please be wary of Apple Mail, which sends attachments only in the HTML alternative of multipart/alternative emails, making the attachment invisible to people who read the text alternative for security and/or accessibility reasons. If you use Apple Mail, please either don’t send attachments, or use some other email client to send them.

If you’re not sure how to configure your email client to follow these guidelines, please practice by sending yourself a letter and then examining all the bytes in the resulting message with your favorite source inspector. For example, if you read email via desktop Gmail you can go to the top of the email (where the sender and timestamp are located), click on the three stacked dots and then click on “Show original”. If you use Thunderbird, you can simply type Ctrl+U.

My email address is below.