While the amount of emails that I receive is not overwhelming (yet), I still find that people are sending me a lot of annoying emails. Here are a few ground rules 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. I loath such emails sent in private to mailing list posts. They tend to be preachy, annoying, and worthless.

  One person, who sent me a lot of emails like that, and whom I talked to about it on IM and told him how I felt, claimed that he sent such emails when what he had to say was not well-thought enough. Well, my reply now is that if you want to send me a non-well-thought email - don’t. Please respect me enough to make sure it is a mature idea or else don’t send it at all.

  Feel free to criticise me in public, as long as you do it with decency, respect, and while avoiding common logical fallacies.

  If you do want to send me a private E-mail to a mailing list post, please explicitly say that the E-mail is sent in private, and detail the reason for it. Else, I am likely to throw away your E-mail.

• Please don’t send me a “Can you teach me how to become a hacker?” emails. See my How Can I Start Contributing to Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) essay instead. If you’re living in Tel Aviv and vicinity and are willing to pay for me giving you private lessons, then this is an option.

• 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.

  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.