That’s what happened to me. Each site had it’s own lynette@something.com address, had it’s own support email address and on and on. Well I had enough of it.

Last week, I spent some time going through all the different email addresses on all the different web sites I own. Those that aren’t in use anymore, got deleted.

Those that are, were directed to a bounce back message telling people the email is no longer active and to contact us through out help desk. This should create a single contact point for all websites. It was such a big sense of accomplishment. Then you know what? That nagging feeling came in. What if my team wanted to contact me on an urgent support request?

After some thinking, I settled on using SMS because:

• I didn’t want my team to spend money on long distance (or international calling fees) to call or leave me a voicemail.
• I didn’t want yet another special email address.
• I wanted to make it as easy as possible for them. No re-learning anything new.
• I wanted a contact method that doesn’t require them to get new gadgets or software.
• I wanted the ability to reach me even when I’m away from the computer.
• Mostly, I wanted something that works more like the good old fashioned pagers - remember those?

Very quickly, I found a simple free SMS/Text Messenger script, edited the HTML just a little bit to hide my cell phone number. Uploaded it to a private web site and sent the page along to the my team. It works nice.

The form connects to a free SMS gateway at