If you aren't receiving
email from me:

Most of the time, I respond to email from students within one or two working days. Sometimes I respond on weekends, but I don't promise to do this.

• If school isn't in session, then I may be on vacation. (I do on rare occassions actually take vactions...) If you haven't gotten a response from me, look at my home page to see if I have posted a notice that I will be unavailable (or slow to respond) before you get too uptight about it.
  
  
• Sometimes a person has an incorrect email address listed on their email message to me. Then the message I send in reply is rejected and I have no way to tell them about it. To check this, please send yourself a message. When you receive it, "reply to" it by hitting the appropriate command in your email program. Then write yourself another test message and send it. If you don't receive this second test message, then you have a problem and you need to fix it right away. In most email programs, you can change your return address in "Preferences." If you can't figure out how to do that, you can call me during my office hours and I'll try to help you.
  
  
• Occasionally I have had a student whose address is @hotmail.com tell me that they do not receive any messages from me. I am guessing this has something to do with their spam filters, but I don't really know. If this seems to be happening to you, this is a MAJOR PROBLEM if you are one of my students. Please tell me about it and give me a way to contact you by telephone (including times when you are available). If you are one of my students in a Distance Learning class, you may need to get an email account with another provider if you can't get this fixed right away.
  
  
• Also, many email accounts and email programs today come with "anti-spam" (or "anti-junk mail") filters. Normally, this is a very good thing. However, I have had a few cases where these filters have blocked my email to students in the course. There are two things you should do to try and avoid problems with this:
  
  a. Sometime early in the course, be sure you send me an email from your normal account with a question (or just asking for a reply) and be sure that you get a reply back from me. It may take me a day or two to reply (when things are busy; normally I reply the same day or next day), but if you don't hear back from me within 3 or 4 days, you need to look into this right away. First, check and see if there is a message from me in your "junk" or "spam" or "trash" folder (in your email program). If there is, see if there is a way to add me to your filter's "white list" (see below for more details). If there isn't, call and leave me a message (go here for contact info) with a call-back phone number and we can figure out what is going on.
  
  b. If you email program (or you email server) has something like a "white list" or "safe list" or "friends list" for email addresses that will never be marked as spam/junk mail, then add my email address (mmcguff@austinc.edu) to that list. That way, you should safely receive any messages from me.
  
  
• If nothing seems to be working, you can always call me or come by my office hours and see me (see my home page for my contact information). If you do call me please be sure to leave a return phone number on my voicemail.