It's odd that one scarcely gets anything worth having by post, yet one always wants one's letters

-- Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

How to Send me Email

My email address is overton "at" cs.nyu.edu. In addition to using a standard spam filter, I sort my email checking whether addresses and subjects match certain patterns. If your email address or subject does not match my list of acceptable patterns, your message will not be accepted into my regular mailbox and will instead be delivered to a spam file where it will probably never be read. I do not generate automatic replies to such emails, because replies alert spammers that my address is valid.

I accept all email from the domains .edu, .gov, .ca, but no longer from .org, which is now used by many spammers. I accept email from a long list of known subdomains such as gmail.com, siam.org, mathprog.org, ams.org, ieee.org, ibm.com, etc. I also accept all email from .ac.uk, .ac.be, .ac.at, .edu.tr, edu.ar, .ac.il, .edu.au, .ac.nz, .ac.jp, .ac.cn, .edu.cn, .edu.hk, .ac.kr, .edu.sg, .ac.th, .ac.in and .ac.za, which means I accept mail from all academic addresses in the UK, Belgium, Austria, Turkey, Argentina, Israel, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, China, Hong Kong, Korea, Singapore, Thailand, India and South Africa. However, other countries present more difficulties; there is a lot of spam from .de and .fr, for example, and no easy way to screen for all academic addresses in many countries. Consequently, I check for only a few academic subdomains of .de, .fr, .be, .nl, .es, .pt, .it, .se, .dk, .no, .ch, .br, .mx, etc., including some patterns such as uni-*.de and tu-*.de. I do not accept most email from .org, .com, .net, etc.

If you are not sure that your email will reach me, please use one of the following methods:

  1. send your email with a subject header that begins with the first six digits of pi, including the decimal point.
  2. send email to my assistant, Stephanie Tracy, stephanie "at" cs.nyu.edu, asking her to forward your email to me.
  3. telephone me at 1-212-998-3121 or, outside the academic year, Stephanie at 1-212-998-3103
When appropriate, I will edit my pattern file so that your email address will match it in the future.

Thanks for your patience. If you want a copy of my .procmailrc file that does this filtering on a unix/linux system, send me email!