I am not on vacation, but I am at the end of a long time delay. I am located somewhere on Earth, but as far as responding to email is concerned, I appear to be well outside the solar system.

After your message arrives at gnu.org, I will collect it in my next batch of incoming mail, some time within the following 24 hours. I will spend much of the following day reading that batch of mail and will come across your message at some point. If I can write a response for it immediately, the response will go out in the next outgoing batch--typically around 24 hours after I collected your message, but occasionally sooner or later than that.  As a result, you should expect a minimum delay of between 24 and 48 hours in seeing any response to your mail to me.

If you are having a conversation with me, please keep in mind that each message you receive from me is probably a response to the mail you sent 24 to 48 hours earlier, and any subsequent mail you sent has not yet been seen by me.


If you are in big hurry to speak with me, and one day's delay would be a serious problem, you can ask my assistant to phone me. Send mail to <rms-assist@gnu.org> saying what you would like to talk with me about, and giving your telephone number. You can also call the Free Software Foundation office at 617-542-5942 (weekday Boston business hours) and ask them to phone me on your behalf.

If you aren't in such a hurry that phoning me is needed, please don't bother contacting them; just send me mail directly. The message you send me directly will reach me sooner than any message forwarded by someone else. I will get back to you as soon as I can.

If you do not wish to receive this message ever again, please send a message to rms-autoreply-control@gnu.org with the subject "OFF".  Otherwise, you might receive a reply like this one up to once a month.