Even if it all is in good faith, they will just get so many mails about business inquiries, recruits, media reqesting interviews, academia, etc. Very hard for little Timmy to ask a quick question via email these days.
over about a hundred emails i've received about 30 replies.
the surprising thing to me is that their level of 'fame' has little to do with whether or not they reply to me. I've received replies from some famously impressive people, and have been ignored by some real 'niche' ones.
I have a suspicion that there is a bit of a bi-modal distribution between 'small enough to reply to fans' and 'so big that there is a reply crew on-staff', most of my emails that were ignored were "Famous but not that famous" types of folks that are in the middle between the two.
if he'd constantly sending one person dozes on messages, maybe demanding a response or something, that would be stalking
I don’t remember what made me start doing it nor what my letters said but I have dozens of autographed pictures of famous people from Elton John to John Stamos just from asking.
If you email someone who is famous for trivial media I’d doubt you’d get a response, but I know some people who have had conversations with more intellectual celebrities over email.
When you reach out with a genuine interest or point in a specific topic I’d like to think they often enjoy speaking about it.
I never would have expected my brother to get an email back from Noam Chomsky but he did after he wrote a decently cogent and complex question.
At the end of the day it possibly wasn’t actually him, but who knows.
There was a time in HS when I had several to-fro with DMR about Unix philosophy without fully realizing what a giant he was in our CS galaxy. I truly miss him.