E-Mailing Central Hobbies

With the current RASH of e-mail viruses, worms and Spam we are taking extra precautions to protect ourselves.

It is possible for a Valid e-mail to get caught in our filtering and be deleted before we see them.

If you have e-mailed us recently and not received a reply to your e-mail or acknowledgment of receipt of your e-mail, this may be the reason why. Please resend your e-mail or phone us.

Please note that we prefer to receive E-Mail in PLAIN TEXT.
Our Spam and Virus filters have been trapping some messages using all the Outlook (and other new programs) fancy options. If you sent us a message using one of those programs and have not received a reply, it may because your message was filtered out. You should try re-sending your message in plain text.

If you are having this problem we suggest phoning us (keeping mind the time zone differences).

Why Didn't You answer my email?

We receive the occasional indignant email: "I sent you and email a short while ago and you haven't answered yet".

The first question is: Did we ever receive your email?

If you want to know what guarantee you have of your email being delivered we will have to do a bit of historical research. Find an old Western Union Telegraph Form. Look on the backside of the form. You will find paragraphs of very fine print that states that Western Union will attempt to deliver your telegraph but are under no obligation to make sure that it is delivered and that they are in no way liable if it is not delivered.

Now consider this, with email you do not even have that guarantee.

You have no guarantee that your email will ever be delivered. Despite this the email system works quite well world wide, and considering the number of messages in the system, a surprisingly small percentage of messages are lost. That does not help of course when it is your message that is lost.

The bottom line is that if you absolutely must have an answer now, pick up the phone and call us or if you are in the area drop by the store.

E Mail Subject

It helps if your email has a valid subject line. A blank subject line or something like "Re:" looks like Spam and may be discarded unread.

If your subject looks like any of the Nigerian Scams (or similar bogus emails) we will never see your email.

Spam Blocking Services

With the proliferation of Spam several companies have sprung up that offer mail protection services. These block or allow emails depending on rules they devise.

We understand why people use these services, there is too much email garbage out there.

However if we try to respond to an email from you and we have to jump through several time wasting hoops to get a reply to you, we will only spend the time to do this if we have the time to do this.

Attachments

E-mails with large attachments may be discarded unread as an attachment can include a virus. We look at the sender before deciding to open or discard.

Updated - August 12, 2019