Update (20080917): Please just email me as the dave user at email dot asnetinc period net (you know how to replace the 'dot' and 'period' with real dots, of course) for now; the address described below is about 800,000 messages (20090210: more than 2 million messages) behind, by now.

You may (or may not) want to email me at some point. If you don't, I don't hold it against you; if you do, I appreciate the opportunity to get some real mail amid the 5K+ junk mail messages that I'm forced to deal with on a daily basis. In a half-hearted attempt to keep that number from increasing too quickly, I've decided not to put my email address up in too many places. Now, I know some guys will put their addresses in images or nifty JavaScript-encoded formats, but since my Web browser (Lynx - used to be a modified w3m until dave2 went) doesn't understand either (and until recently, a huge percentage of my visitors also used Lynx), I'm not terribly excited about doing it. (Subtracting further from my excitement is the fact that many modern address collection scripts can do what Lynx can't. I'm not interested in this Tom & Jerry race, since the cat tends to lose.) Instead, I've decided to challenge the authors of the address collection scripts with a word game (assuming they're not smart enough to figure out my email address based on its obviousness given my name and this domain name). This technique has the advantage of being fully compliant with ancient Web standards, and by extension supporting my browser of choice (among others). It has the side effect, of course, of being highly resistant to SpiderMonkey-enabled address harvesters, as well as address harvesters that may employ OCR techniques. (Companies like Panscient already attempt to decode JavaScript, and I assume they probably employ OCR too. If they can do it, so can those who gather info for more annoying purposes.) Without further ado, here goes:

My email address starts with the first letter of the name of my keymap (the Dvorak keymap, that is), followed by the first letter of the English alphabet (which happens to be the first letter of the word "alphabet," which is hardly a coincidence, since it comes from the Greek "alpha" "beta" and/or the Hebrew "aleph" "bet"), followed by the middle letter of my favorite text editor (Elvis), followed by the first letter of the same program (Elvis). There's then an "at" sign (@). From there, it's simply this domain name (BigFatDave, with a .com ending).

Epilogue: As it turns out, the technique above also has the unintended side-effect of being undecipherable to many non-Americans. Unfortunately, that's an intrinsic feature of language-based techniques for mildly encrypting data. (In plain English, the speaker and the intended audience need to have some shared information in order to be able to understand each other easily. In this case, I'm using a basic understanding of the English language, which most people I interact with (and there's the source of the problem with this approach - only my inbox knows how many people I don't interact with precisely because of this) have (but very very few scripts have), as that "shared information.") I'm open to other Turing tests that don't rely on any technology more sophisticated than telnet, which I consider the baseline for complete access to my online home. Now, there's an obvious chicken-and-egg problem here, in that if you can't figure out my email address, suggesting an alternate Turing test (so you can get my email address) might not be entirely trivial. For those of you, there may be an alternate solution; if you have a browser that supports this page, you may contact me C/O my employer. If all else fails, you can always do a Whois lookup on this domain, and either call, email, or snailmail me. (I don't use the private registration stuff, since I don't believe it's the correct solution. Please note, however, that the email address listed there isn't my normal one, and as such is suboptimal for actually reaching me (as opposed to one of my employer's technicians, who'll presumably forward it to me).)

Please note, BTW, that if you trust AOL or Yahoo! to manage your email, you're out of luck, if you expect to receive a reply from me. They trust the Spamhaus SBL to guard the gates to their mail servers, refusing mail from any IP address that's listed in the SBL. The IP of my outgoing mail server is on the Spamhaus SBL because a couple of years ago, a SPAM complaint was entered against a customer of my ISP. Spamhaus contacted my ISP; my ISP responded with multiple offers to work with them to eliminate the problem, and never heard back from Spamhaus. Apparently, the volunteers who run Spamhaus didn't have the time to respond to my ISP, so they just blocked all the IPs (more than 4000 - four thousand) of my ISP without even a courtesy note. Fast forward a couple of years: I emailed Spamhaus myself a number of times, since I noticed that my particular IPs have exactly zero "incidents" reported, even according to Spamhaus themselves, so I thought it might be wise for them to at least "whitelist" my IPs, since I've never sent SPAM (from any IP, ever), and I never plan to ... and nobody has any proof to the contrary, not even Spamhaus. Needless to say, I never heard back from them. I understand they're a whole bunch of volunteers, but I find it ridiculous that anybody actually trusts them to filter his mail using two-year-old SBL entries. Alternatives to AOL and Yahoo! Mail exist, for example GMail (although I wouldn't touch it with a ten-foot pole after my last experience, having their "junk mail" filter delete three months-worth of my voicemail, with nobody at Google able to restore the lost data). Hotmail also accepts mail without treating the Spamhaus SBL as its bible (update (20080522): it no longer does), but I wouldn't feel comfortable trusting Bill Gates with my email. If all else fails, you can always sign up for the FreeMailService.org Beta (don't let the "beta" confuse you - the back end powering the system is an industrial strength mail server platform with many years of production use at a number of very large ISPs; the account management interface is the beta part).

I've decided to start an alphabetical listing of known working and known broken domains, for your convenience. If you want to email me from one of the domains listed as "broken," you may want to talk to your email provider about allowing you to receive my inevitable response to your email. (Simply turning off "SPAM Protection" used to do the trick, but most email providers no longer give you that option. Instead, they've simply updated their Terms of Service to let you know that their email service doesn't guarantee that they'll deliver your incoming email.) Here's the list: