Email is good.

A blog ostensibly about email productivity by Chris Coyier who you can email, obviously, at chris@coyier.com

I’d like to talk to a variety of people who choose to make their email address completely unfindable on the internet and understand why. I’m sure there are a wide variety of reasons. Opening yourself up to communication from strangers is classically problematic from a potential abuse and harassment angle, so that’s one reason people have, I’m sure, as much as that sucks. I imagine other folks just can’t be bothered to receive email, and don’t want to lead people on.

Quick brainstorm. People have absolutely no public email because…

  • Work email is overwhelming enough, they don’t want to communicate with the public that way.
  • A public email is an avenue for abuse/harassment they had to shut down.
  • They see no value in it.
  • They are so famous it would be overwhelming, and can’t/don’t choose to have an employee handle it.
  • They don’t really care, they just don’t have any other digital place to make that email known.

This was just some for-fun brainstorming though, I do need to actually ask some people (if I can reach them!).

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3 responses to “No Public Email on Purpose”

  1. Martin McCallion Avatar

    I’ve always supposed it’s mainly fear of spam. The assumption that spammers harvest email addresses from publicly-visible sources.

  2. Chris Coyier Avatar

    I’m still curious about this.

  3. Levi Breederland Avatar

    I recently clicked on Casey Neistat’s website. I highly recommend doing so; it’s fun seeing how someone who is “that big” and “that online”—but also not a web persona really—does a personal website.

    Now I don’t know if his email is listed somewhere else but he makes it really clear on the website that he doesn’t have the time for you and will just ignore you unless you go through the correct channels (@ on X for casual, booking agent for speaking, pre-emptively rejecting the rest). I bet that’s hard though.

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