Scoble is concerned about how hard it is to find email contacts for bloggers. He mentioned this awhile back and at that time I updated my picture on the homepage of this blog with office telephone number, Skype and email address. I’m somewhat curious what blogger he is having such a hard time communicating with that doesn’t have any sort of trivially searched preferred contact method?

Must admit that I rarely find trouble contacting people online. Readers, do you have trouble contacting people online?

I think part of the problem with Robert’s analogy is he seems to assume everybody prefers email as their primary contact method. I sure don’t and have said so several times. Therefore, I don’t make the assumption others prefer that method of contact either. This isn’t the same as saying: don’t ever email me, so please don’t be confused, it’s just that those who send to any public accessible email address are more likely not to receive a response. Better, more reliable, less time consuming ways of contacting me have been posted several times and I continue to encourage folks whom don’t have my non-public direct email addresses (which more than likely guarantee a response) to use those preferred alternate contact methods.

In this post on April 1, 2005 I laid out my primary preference in contact methods and email was last on the list and here nearly a year later it still is last on the list:

Email. This our the least preferred method of contact and actually, due to the volume of email received daily, doesn’t reliably guarantee a response. If it’s important then I would suggest using one of the other four methods [comment/trackback to blog, call, skype or IRC]. With this in mind, my email address is listed on our business contact page.

We are a small developer shop. There is me, one part time accounting person and another part time person, and that’s all for managing many different commercial and non-commercial websites. We don’t want to expand beyond this amount of help at this time and in order to manage this tiny group (where me, myself and I are the primary employees) time spent on tasks needs to be — and is — carefully managed.

Our business contact page has been on the web since 1999 and my public business contact email hasn’t changed during that time. Of course that has become one of my most spammed email addresses and biggest time liabilities (FU spammers). Anybody I talk to via the other four methods above almost without exception receives a different email address with the caveat: “please do not put this email on any list, this is my direct email address.” My direct email addresses get much more response activity than the public ones.

Still, I’ve had to change direct email addresses several times because people have failed to honor this request and put me on lists anyway. And sometimes I’ve given the email out to a list where it was promised it would not be published and it still was published anyway at a later date in time .. and once it was published the spam was not far behind. Argh.

We are using multiple methods of spam filtering and I remain disappointed by the number of false positives that these methods result. I’ve found it’s more reliable telling people to call, comment on the blogs, Skype or use IRC as opposed to sending email (to our non-direct email addresses). Ironically, I once had great difficulty contacting Scoble via email. His response? He never received the emails.

As readers know, I just got back from Search Champs and yesterday decided to send email to the coordinator — from what I thought was a whitelisted email address — and Microsoft’s filters bounced with the message:

your e-mail was rejected by an anti-spam content filter on gateway (IP redacted). Reasons for rejection may be: obscene language, graphics, or spam-like characteristics. Removing these may let the e-mail through the filter.> (in reply to end of DATA command)

My email contained a detailed list of recommendations for MSN Search.

[sigh]

Enough of my email challenges, how about you? How do you handle contact email for your online presence? Do you publish your email, unobfuscated? Do you do business with the public and find that filtering costs you business?

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