E-mail

Professor John Munro passed away on December 23, 2013. This site is maintained and kept online as an archive. For more infomation please visit the Centre for Medieval Studies

Notes on contacting me by e-mail

Revised on 28 September 2012:

Some explanations concerning my responses -- or non-responses -- to e-mails:

E-mail services are primarily for my own students, colleagues, and friends. If you are not one of my own students or a colleague or faculty member at the University of Toronto, or a friend, or an academic colleague elsewhere, please refrain from sending me e-mail queries, e.g., requesting assistance on essays or research projects. Such requests will be ignored. And please note that this warning applies to high school teachers, across the world, as well as to all high school students and all university students outside of the University of Toronto. I will, however, respond to those students who are studying with a colleage of mine (i.e., someone who is personally known to me), provided that the colleague first requests assistance from me. In sum: if I do not know you personally and if you do not meet any of these criteria, please do not contact me. Please find an alternative source of information, and do not assume so wrongly that I have the time and energy to deal with your problems.

E-MAIL ETIQUETTE: Please observe traditional courtesies in sending e-mails: in particular, in not addressing me by my first name, if you are an undergraduate student or if you are otherwise unknown to me. Graduate students, however, as colleagues-to-be, or those whom I do know personally, all faculty and staff in my department at the University of Toronto, all academic colleagues (or those whom I know), and of course personal friends are invited to address me by my first name. But if you are not one of these and do if you do not follow the rules of etiquette, as set forth above, do not expect a reply from me.

I always reply, and generally promptly, to all legitimate e-mail messages from friends, colleagues, and my own students: or rather to those who identify themselves and the course properly, in the subject heading. Thus, if you do not receive a reply from me with a few days, contact me again, properly leave a message (if I am not there) to tell me about non-answered e-mails, and to ask me to look again at my e-mail files.

At the same time, please note that some legitimate e-mails sent to me may not arrive in my folder on the Chass server -- especially those sent to me using hot-mail and g-mail (so: please do not use these services). Don't assume that because you have sent an e-mail, and because it has not been returned to you, I have necessarily received it. So again: if you do not receive a reply within a day or so, follow up with both another e-mail and a phone message, letting me know the situation.

MY STUDENTS MUST CLEARLY IDENTIFY BOTH THEMSELVES AND THE COURSE in both the e-mail 'subject heading' and in the text of the message. Unless I know who you are, I will delete from the server, unread, all e-mail messages that do not clearly identify my course(s) in the subject heading; and you must also supply a few words, in that subject heading, that clearly identify a legitimate problem.

Do not use code names or nick names. To repeat the key point: I will not reply to any e-mail that does not clearly disclose the full name and identity of the sender. If you fail to observe these warnings, do not be surprised if I do not respond to your e-mail.

If you have followed these instructions, especially concerning your identity, and still do not receive a reply, then possibly your message has been eliminated by the spam-filter on the CHASS main frame; or I may have accidentally deleted it on the main frame. Please send me the e-mail message again, or fax, or phone me (numbers given above). Please understand that I have to delete about 200 e-mails every morning, and thus there is a risk that I have inadvertently deleted your legitimate e-mail.

When I am away from the university: generally when I am in Europe, in April or early May, again in July or August, and late September. When I am out of town, I usually post a 'vacations' message on my e-mail, indicating my departure and return dates. Rarely, however, are my absences from the University of Toronto to be explained by vacations: almost invariably I am in Europe to take part in conferences, or to do archival research. I access e-mails when abroad only rarely. When I am abroad, I normally post this information on my Current Notices web page.

Other Points About E-mail Policies and Etiquette:

To repeat: I will not respond to any e-mails from students who do not clearly identify their name and the course number and title (ECO 301Y and/or ECO 303Y) and clearly indicate the nature of the problem or question raised. And I will not reply to anyone whom I do not know but who, nevertheless, addresses me by my first name.
Please do not expect replies from me during evening hours and weekends, since I often do not check my e-mails on my home computer.

Please make sure that you consult the course outline/syllabus, other handouts, and the course website BEFORE submitting inquiries to me (or the TA) by e-mail. It is very irksome and tiresome to respond to questions whose answers may be readily found in these documents, when students do not take the time to read them. I will just direct you to these web documents, without supplying an answer.
In particular, I must remind students that I will not reply to e-mails that ask questions whose answers are readily found in the course outlines: both the one-page and the multi-page course outlines.
Please do not send me e-mails with questions concerning the lectures, or concerning questions whose answers are readily available from my Home Page. If you have a complicated question, come to see me during office hours -- and do not abuse the privileges of e-mails. I should also not have to repeat information that I also gave in class, especially when that information is contained in the online lectures, ususally posted the same evening.
If you are seeking definitions of economic terms, please consult my web page for Online Glossaries and Dictionaries of Economics.
When a question cannot easily or briefly be answered with a reply email, I will simply indicate to the student that s/he should see me (or my TA) during my announced office hours (Thursday, 2:30 to 4:00 pm).
On most issues, you should consult me first, and not the TA, unless you are querying a grade that he has assigned on a term essay.
E-mail should NOT be used as an alternative to meeting with me (or the TA) during office hours. Nor should e-mail be used as a mechanism to receive private tutorials (especially prior to term assignments) or to explain material that was covered in lectures you missed. Remember that all my lectures are posted on line. I am, however, willing to discuss minor and brief points, for clarification.
I encourage you to send me mail using your UTORmail email account: see Instructions on using UTORmail, which is usually in either of these two formats:
- (1) The older system (still used by some students): firstname.surname@utoronto.ca -- as indicated in my e-mail address, above.
- (2) The newer system (from 2011): first name (or initials).surname@mail.utoronto.ca
You can easily forward mail received at your UTORmail account to the e-mail account that you use regularly. Please note that many alternative e-mail servers -- such as Hotmail, Yahoo, GMail, etc. -- are not reliable or have limited capacity. You are more likely to ensure that I receive and respond to your e-mails, if you use UTORmail.
Warning Concerning Attachments: DO NOT SEND ME ANY E-MAIL ATTACHMENTS, except in pdf format, by prior arrangement. Despite anti-virus progammes, viruses -- especially in Word documents -- still pose too great a danger. In particular, I WILL NOT ACCEPT TERM ESSAYS OR OTHER ASSIGNMENTS IN E-MAIL ATTACHMENTS; and I will accept pdf files only as proof that you have met the deadline concerned. You must still supply me with a hard copy; for I should not have to bear the expense of the paper and ink to print out your papers. Statistical or other research documents that you send me, by prior agreement, are of course quite different; and if you are doing me a favour in sending me such documents (and if I agree to accept them), then I will bear these costs.
E-mails containing any attachments with the following file-name extensions will be rejected by University of Toronto CHASS server, because they have been used to insert viruses and other malicious codes:
.ace, .ade, .adp, .bas, .bat, .chm, .cla, .class, .cmd, .com, .cpl, .crt, .cs, .eml, .email, .exe, .hta, .inf, .ins, .isp, .js, .jse, .lnk, .mde, .msc, .msi, .msp, .mst, .ocx, .pcd, .pif, .reg, .scr, .sct, .shs, .shb, .vb, .vbe, .vbs, .wsc, .wsf, .wsh and .zip
In the past, files with the .zip extensions had been used legitimately in order to compress large files into more manageable formats. That is no longer possible (not at this university, at least). To send large files, or a collection of large files, the best method is to link them to a web page (if you have a web page, i.e., a 'Home Page'); and then send the URL for the web link in an e-mail.
Please also note this URL (web link) from the University of Toronto Commputing Network Services Group: UTORmail: Virus Filtering and Renaming Attachments (Win).