Like many of my colleagues I get tens and tens of emails per day. My estimate is that about one quarter of is spam that by definition cannot be caught by any spam filter. I really get irritated by receiving these emails. I will give a few examples that I got today: (i) a the Journal of Chemical Physics with an email containing news flashes about recent developments and (ii) the Belgian funding organization FWO with an issue of their periodical newsletter. And also the Dutch science funding organizations STW and NWO send me regularly unsolicited emails.

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In the majority of cases that you communicate with journal editors you have to do it through a web form. When you submit a paper, or when you have to act on referee reports, or when you act as a reviewer of a paper. Science supporting agencies also have discovered the ease of web forms. Submission of proposals – usually in the form of filing out a number of text boxes and uploading a number of pdf files – also has to be done through a web interface.

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