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Comment by theaeolist | Hacker News Reader

It's not true, obviously. I have been in DK's office, I have seen him read and write email.

Over the last three years, I have sent 12 emails to him, at the two addresses mentioned on the page (all were bug reports, as he says that's the only kind of email he accepts). Of these, 11 were processed in the way indicated on the page: several weeks later, I got a reply in my (postal) mailbox, with Knuth's replies in pencil over a printout of my email. For the other one, I got a two-line reply by email, saying thanks and that an updated version had been uploaded. (This was a correction to a section he was writing, that I sent immediately after a talk he gave about it. Interestingly, the "from" address on the email was that of his secretary—who comes in once a week AFAIK—but signed "-- Don".)

So I think the content on this page is still substantially true, with rare exceptions.

Having refuted the central point of this entire essay, why do you think he wrote this in the first place?

As a PR piece for why most email to him goes unanswered?

Like most people who say they're going to quit something he probably just started using it again when he realised it was useful and maybe even essential, and didn't bother to update this webpage. It's been 30 years after all.

> Changed by: Ursula N. Owen, 8-Mar-1999

I was curious about this “Ursula N. Owen”, thinking perhaps she was an assistant of Knuth’s back in the 90s. It turns out that it’s a pseudonym sometimes used by Knuth himself, and is a reference to “U.N. Owen”, a character from And Then There Were None, a best-selling Agatha Christie novel first published in 1939 and one of the best-selling books of all time. The name “UN Owen” itself is a play on “unknown”, and I like to think of Donald chuckling to himself whenever he used that pseudonym.

From the postscript on https://ryanwaggoner.substack.com/p/could-you-delete-your-em...

This was written a while ago. Can we figure out how long ago?

Well, internet archive verifies it existed on the web in 1997.

https://web.archive.org/web/19970526031736/https://www-cs-fa...

Which client does he use?

2 bar magnets. He reads emails one iota at a time

> My boss did his PhD at Stanford. The story goes that one day he walked straight into Knuth's office, while he had the door open. Knuth says "Oh dear, I seem to have made a mistake. Could you close the door please?". Boss closes the door. Knuth says "No, from the other side". Source: reddit

I think this was from an episode of The IT Crowd.

Any proof of this?

Uhm, how would he prove that? He probably didn’t take a photo of the occurrence.

A witness is proof, unless you have a specific reason to believe the witness is unreliable.

I met DK when he was visiting my university. So "his" office was the office he was assigned when visiting. He is the most wonderful person you can imagine. He came to my office and he introduced himself in the most affable way. We socialised quite a lot for the duration of his visit. I went into his office because he wanted to show me some proofs on his whiteboard, that he was very excited about. There was a email client on the screen but I didn't pry, I just noticed it.

Also, it is pretty much absurd to believe that someone who is on the faculty of a university, where all business is conducted via email, will not read email.