Here’s an interesting question for you. How many email addresses do you have? Too many? It doesn’t matter if they are all mailboxes or just forwarded. As you build more sites, you know the email addresses start getting a life of their own.

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Those that are, were directed to a bounce back message telling people the email is no longer active and to contact us through out help desk.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