By Graham K. Rogers

There are some who just do not know when to move on. For the last couple of years, I have been sent emails, sometimes on a daily basis, from an Australian who will not stop, despite being asked: "Serial pest" he writes - like a toothless old dog gnawing at a meatless bone - as if his old age allows him to behave as only he sees fit.

He is Gary Duncan. He apparently lives near Melbourne. Feel free to write to him as often as he does me. The email is gary@gmduncan.com. Please, share your opinions with him as he insists he can with me.

I had hoped to be able to move on to some of the more content-rich emails that I have from Duncan, but on Tuesday morning there were three messages waiting for me when I awoke.

The first makes a threat. Like the bully stopped by the police here, who asks "Do you know who my father is?" the writer threatens to tell my boss that I am putting his emails online after confirming that he had written, "please don't quote me."

This is not bad after 2 days personal attention, but it might be useful to reminder anyone reading that I have been asking for more than 2 years for the unwanted emails to stop. As such, especially with the rudeness and inferences some of them contain [see the reference to pole dancing, below], they are little more than spam.

With spam (small "s" - I like the one in the can), the normal process is to use a filter to reject. However, the head of the Computer Forensics section at the Faculty advised against this for a number of reasons.

Now, Duncan threatens "to refer the matter to the Chancellor of Mahidol University and ask if the compositor of the Chronicles is the same person as" . . . Well of course I am. Except a compositor is one of those old print workers who arranges the type. Mr Malaprop strikes again.

Of course the President (Thai universities don't have Chancellors) wouldn't have a clue what he was being asked, so he would ask my boss, who would ask me. The emails would be shared, I would ask the head of the Forensics Section to comment and a committe would probably be formed.

Duncan lost the moral high ground long ago. Rather than him, I am now controlling the narrative; and controlling the delivery of the content.

Perhaps that is how Duncan sees it as about 3 hours later (there was an interim email that suggests he may not be aware that a screen shot takes an image of the contents displayed on the screen, not the full browser page) a second email arrived. This reminded me of Jack Nicholson in Mars Attacks: "and maybe we can all get along together. . ."

After pointing out the possible ambiguity in using personal emails - but not the questionable morals in continuing to send unwanted emails - we take the bully's other tack. If "Do you know who my father is?" doesn't work, we shift the approach and start whining: he writes, "Do this and we can "all move on". And I'll desist from sending you email ;)"

- Jeez, a smiley, too.

Maybe I could have moved on a couple of years back, but that was not an option open to me: despite being asked to stop several times, the emails and the rudeness continued. There is no excuse for online bullying. But this small man has wasted much of my time already and I can walk away any time. However, there are conditions:

• I will not remove any of the (now) 3 Chronicles posted so far as that would be censorship. Even those articles in which I have been wrong - perhaps through speculation - remain online. I am interested in a full record, not the inventions of one man's mind.

• Gary Duncan makes a reasonable, verifiable donation to the Dhamikkayawittaya School for the Blind, or to the Rachasuda Foundation.

• The emails cease forthwith, except for a brief, polite acceptance.

Other than that I am ready to move on to his apparent obsession with pole dancing that first appeared in an email in October 2010 when I made it quite clear then I was not at all interested.

Please feel free to write to him as often as he does me at gary@gmduncan.com. I will be sharing selectively some more of these emails as the opportunity arises: being past retirement age does not allow carte blanche or freedom from responsibility.

Graham K. Rogers teaches at the Faculty of Engineering, Mahidol University in Thailand where he is also Assistant Dean. He wrote in the Bangkok Post, Database supplement on IT subjects. For the last seven years of Database he wrote a column on Apple and Macs.