Please please please, if you list your email address on your website, you must check your email frequently. This means AT LEAST several times a week. (I feel like I check mine several hundred times a day.) And please get back to people in a timely manner.
Additionally, if you have a spam filter on your email, you should check the contents of your junk mail folder before “purging” it. You can’t imagine the amount of legitimate email that gets trapped by these filters.
We are strong advocates for using email addresses on websites as opposed to those contact forms you often see.
Proponents of contact forms claim that they cut down on the amount of spam you’ll get. This may be true in some cases, but don’t you worry, determined spammers will get their junk through to you anyway. We would argue that these forms may in fact cut down on the number of legitimate contacts you get through your site.
We feel this way because contact forms can be unreliable. If the sender accidently mistypes their email address you may be left with no way to get back to them. In addition, most of the times these forms don’t give the sender any feedback that the message was actually sent, so they are left wondering if they’ll ever get a reply.
We also feel that these forms sort of imply a lack of trust on the part of the website owner that “I’m so worried about getting spam mail that I won’t let you know what my email address is”.
We feel that it just makes good business sense to give potential customers an easy way to contact you which includes listing your email address on your website.