I am extremely reachable.

If you claim you tried to reach me without succeeding, I am either dead, the reason is entirely clear by information on my home page (guess where!) or you have not really tried to reach me. Let me expand on the latter:

Do you have a clear question?

I get many emails of rather vague or general content. I am not always in the mood where I find it natural to answer.

Moreover, from March 1 2012 I am professor emeritus, and have no obligation (like state employees have) to answer to emails when I do not think my answer would matter. If you ask me for a job at KTH that has not been announced, I cannot give you one and I will normally not answer. This applies also to traineeships.

I do not like unreadable email

Word processor files in internal format are not recognized standards. If I receive non-standard files by email you should not assume that I read them, unless that is a condition in commissioned work I do. It is extremely trivial on the sending side (i.e., your side) to save any document in text format before you send it, or to convert it to pdf format. If you don't, I take it as a sign that you do not really care whether or not I read it. KTH has no internal standard for email, so the international standards are the only ones recognized. Although many employees of KTH are very good at sending MS office documents in internal format, I am not one of those who like to open them. Technology progresses, though. Today I use a program, antiword, that extracts a standard file from an MS Word document. I have no idea whether the translation is always accurate, but I take it as a proxy to what you wanted to communicate. All non-text parts of the file seem to disappear in the translation. Ever more fun is that it often finds parts you thought you had deleted in the document. So if you made a last-minute deletion of an insulting remark, I might well find it....

I do not like spam email

Recently, the amount of junk mail has increased dramatically. My spam filter has a very low threshold, so if you feel that you have not got an answer you expected to a message you sent me, please send it again with careful phrasing (not mentioning large money amounts, Africa, Viagra, Silicon or any other offensive keyword...)

What is readable email?

The open formats typically used to transmit unstructured information by email are ascii text, postscript and pdf files. I can easily read gnumeric files and matlab tables also, and images in jpg, png or gif.

What can I do about this?

I give everyone who sends me unreadable email a pointer to this text. Several such persons have indicated that they will try to help me because I have problems. In my opinion, they have problems..... But sometimes I feel that this battle is lost.. By the way, if you could not answer my question at the top of this page, the answer is here: Contact information