Michael Shell's Contact Information

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Be aware that the software packages I maintain are used by tens (or even hundreds) of thousands of users worldwide. With this size of user base, if more than a very small fraction of users encountered problems that required support, I would quickly become overwhelmed. I am happy to report that the number of support questions I receive is manageable. Help to keep it that way by reading and following the instructions below. Please do not ask me questions on the basic/general use of LaTeX (not specifically related to the packages I maintain) -- you can find better and more complete help on the newsgroup comp.text.tex as well as in books about LaTeX (some of which are available online for free).

Spammers are another issue. Because so many people save my email address, virus/worm outbreaks (almost all related to security flaws in Microsoft products) can result in many hundreds of junk emails a day in my inbox. Spam filtering does help, but is imperfect and often requires manual scanning for false positives. If the volume of spam reaches the point of constituting a denial-of-service attack, I will disable the affected email addresses and repost new valid ones here. So, always check this page before emailing me to see which addresses are currently valid.

If you need to contact me about an issue related to IEEEtran, Testflow, Mciteplus, etc., please try to help me help you by doing the following:

Support Check List

  1. Be sure and check to see if your question is not mentioned in the documentation or frequently asked questions on the relevant page (IEEEtran, Testflow, Mciteplus, etc.)
  2. Make sure that you are using the latest version. Tell me what version you are using and where you obtained it.
  3. Tell me what LaTeX packages you are using in your document and their versions.
  4. Include information on what LaTeX distribution (teTeX, MiKTeX, etc.) and operating system (Unix, MS Windows, Mac, etc.) you are using.
  5. If at all possible, try to produce and include a small minimal example that shows the problem.
  6. Be sure and include keywords such as "IEEEtran", "Testflow", etc., in the email subject so that it is easily identified as being legimate email. These days, simple nondescriptive subject lines such as "Question" or "Thank you!" look much like spam.
  7. Please do not send me attachments that exceed 100 Kbytes in length without advance notice. (It is generally considered impolite to assume the person on the other end is always using a broadband connection along with an unlimited inbox capacity.)

I will try to reply as soon as possible. Some questions take longer to answer than others. Also, there may be times when I am away from the computer for a few days. The typical response time is about a day.

attention sign Note: In order to thwart spammers, the email addresses below are displayed in graphical form so as to be resistant to machine harvesting. You will not be able to cut and paste the information, but must manually retype what you see. Please do not post/publish these addresses in public forms/web pages. Instead refer to the URL of this page ( www.michaelshell.org/contact.html ).

For questions relating to the LaTeX packages I maintain, including IEEEtran, Testflow, Mciteplus, etc., please use this address:

Point to right Contact Address for LaTeX Package Related Support Point to left

Contact Address for LaTeX

For everything else, please use this one:

Point to right General Contact Address Point to left

General Contact Address

green diamond sign Note: If you are visually handicapped or your computer cannot render JPEG graphics, you may contact me via the email address "postmaster" which is required to be supported by every domain with a mailserver per section 4.5.1 of RFC 2821.