But, alas, every blessing has its enemies. For starters, there are those vexatious, annoying Spam emails pushing Viagra, Nigerian oil scams, internet gambling, pornography, you name it. The very inexpensiveness of email is the reason for this: spammers can flood the world with millions of unwanted missives for a miniscule cost. To make matters worse, email has become the intrusion vector of choice for the virusPerps, in the form of infected attachments.

My outgoing email includes the usual individual messages and replies. It also includes email-merge messages for things like inviting people to visit my website, advertising a guitar available or sending information I think will be of interest to classical guitarists. 

Those messages are emphatically NOT spam: my email address list consists of carefully selected names/addresses of classical guitar performers, teachers and aficionados, many of whom I know personally; they are addresses I have acquired over several years in the normal course of my luthiery activities, and also addresses I have individually selected from public sources, primarily the Guitar Foundation of America  and other websites. Increasingly my list is coming to consist of people who have asked to be included in my Email List.

All merge emails I send leave my outbox with an individual header only...yours; there are no blind copies, no multiple-recipient "To:" lines, so no one else will ever see your name or email address. And unlike the spammers, I do receive all Replies in my inbox...and I do my best to respond to every one of them.

Any person receiving an email from me who did not ask, and does not wish,  to be on my list need only reply with a request to be removed; I will remove that person's name and personally acknowledge this with an email response.

Occasionally I receive a request for an email address of an individual on my email list. It is my policy not to release such an address without the express permission of the owner.