If I wanted to contact someone I don’t know personally, there’s a few things I’d rather do than hunt around someone’s blog for their email address. The next thing would be dragging my tongue across lines of broken glass shards, by the meter. I figure I’d get to maybe the third row before I pass out.
Having a contact form is okay, but not the greatest experience. It’s impersonal, as far as Internet communication experiences go, and I have no idea where the message is going when I submit it. Is it to the blogger’s email? A hidden forum where these bloggers go to mock and trade insults concerning dufuses like me? Into space? I’m not into shooting potatoes into the air and not knowing where it lands.
If you must, register for a throwaway email address if you’re afraid of spam, although I don’t think that is a problem nowadays. There’s dozens of ways you can get on a spamming list. Having your email on a site is only one. Obfuscating it—like “jay [at] jaydinitto DOT com” or the like—isn’t likely to deter harvesters. Given an afternoon of free time, I could easily write a regex tester from scratch to glean out real address from that.
Conclusion: put your email where I can find it. My tongue is starting to hurt too much.
4 Comments
I’m pretty sure you already have my email address, but just in case, it’s at the top right on my blog.
I think that’s one of the first things I noticed when I went to your blog for the first time, Jill. 😀
I suppose it varies from blog to blog. I had my address up like that in plain sight at one point and it didn’t work out well. I got some really nasty stuff in my inbox, including malware. I had to toss that address and made it just a tad bit more difficult to find. But I agree it should at least be there somewhere.
I was able to easily find yours, even though you obfuscated it.
The worst is when bloggers ask you to leave a comment on their “about” page or the like, as a means of contacting them. Most normal users wouldn’t want to put personal messages on a public page like that.