Contacting TK Boyd / Sheepdog Software (TM)

I'm usually glad to hear from readers. My eddress is:

My email address as a graphic

I'm afraid that's a graphic and that you'll need to copy it by hand.... I'm removing machine readable copies of my eddress from my webpages in an attempt to reduce the spam I get.

Also, at 15 Sept 04, Compuserve seems to be losing emails sent to me. Part of this may be due to efforts at their end to reduce spam, but what is lost is erratic, and includes emails from sensible people with AOL accounts (Compuserve and AOL are both part of the same company). If I get your email, I will usually send at least a "Got It" within 36 hours. Don't hesitate to "pester" me by re-sending things.

I'm most pleased to hear from people who send plain text emails, without attachments. In fact, I usually delete attachments unread, and ignore messages sent in html form. There's a fax number below, if you want to send me some diagram.

I'm most likely to look at something with a subject that appears to have been composed by a human, and isn't a classic spam subject, e.g. not "Tk, you really want to read this...". Making intelligent reference to something in the page you are responding to gives you an edge, as does something referring to a recent bit of world news, e.g. just after an election "Only a human would know that Mr.Xxx won" would be an attention getting subject. "Hi" or "Help" or "Message from internet" rarely get read.

If you use Outlook Express: First: My sympathies. Try Pegasus or Eudora! Second: If you put me in your address book, please tick the "plain text only" box which (in some versions of OE) appears at the lower left of my page in the address book.

I also usually discard unread things with odd characters in the subject line, e.g. "?Big5?B?qETCvrvdqEQyMLhVpEikfrj...". Beware: You may be sending such emails without realising it. The subject might look fine on your machine, but appear as shown on mine. I think it arises from a legitimate mechanism to get around the various character sets needed around the world, but my email client can't handle the protocol.

I also usually discard unread things with return addresses that look like spam engines.

Why don't I use a spam filter? a) I get (falsely!) filtered myself too often, and don't want to miss messages from other people, b) I believe the spammers will get past what the filters devise, c) I download just my message headers and delete the stuff that doesn't look good before I download the rest. I think the anti-spam software would require me to download the messages before discarding them.

If you want to send one email to several people, PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE do not use "cc:", but, rather, use "bcc:" It works like "cc:", except it often hides the list of who else has seen the email from each recipient. A small town professional, let's call him a tax advisor, once sent "a friend" a "I want more work from you" email after he'd stopped using the advisor because his work was unsatisfactory. He used "cc:". And the email came with a virus. The advisor didn't even thank my friend for being alerted to the problem. My friend felt a strong temptation to send an email to all the other people the advisor had pestered. If he'd used "bcc:", it would have been no more work for him, and he would not have supplied my friend with the eddresses of all those other people. (For more information, download Pegasus and read the material on "bcc" in the help file.)

Want a link to your page from my page? I'm more likely to add one for you if when you ask, you say you've already done a link to my site from yours.

I can be reached the old fashioned way as follows:

TK Boyd
PO Box 367
Essex, CT
06426      USA

(Do not put me on mailing lists, please!)

I can be reached via fax on this number in the USA: 1-413-826-7829

That, by the way, is a free service from www.efax.com. Signing up for it was simple and the questions reasonable. I once received a very modest number of advertisements, and even they seem to have stopped. You can "send a fax" to me, as if I had a "real" fax machine on a dedicated phone line, but I don't... I receive what you sent as an email! (You can send the fax at any time of day or night, by the way... you won't wake the household.) I've had it for a few years now, entirely happy with it. Recommended.

Worried I'm not who I say I am? You should be... the net makes life too easy for the dishonest. Do you know about the Way Back Machine at www.archive.org? Besides being cool, it will show you that I've been around since at least December 1998. Just look up...

http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/TK_Boyd/homepage.htm
... and you'll find my eddress (100665...) there, at the bottom. Or, you can check TKBoydChi's profile at eBay.. that's me, too. Go to Google's newsgroup archives... you'll find many posts from me, especially years ago... and you won't find the complaints that arise about scam artists. If I can reassure you some other way, let me know?

I also own the trademark "Sheepdog Software".

If you use an MS-DOS or Windows pc, please visit my freeware and shareware page, download something, and circulate it for me?

Click here to visit editor's freeware, shareware page.

Link to editor's (Arunet) homepage

See the graphic near the start of this page for my eddress (email address). (By the way... I lay claim to having invented that word. Again, the Way Back machine will show you how long I've been using it.)