I can’t take it anymore!
If you wan’t to speak to me, send an email. My contact form is out of service indefinitely.
This is actually in lieu of moving my professional services to a yet to be announced limited company. But I can’t let opportunity for a dramatic blog post go to waste.
Also, I’ll probably skip the contact form on my company website. Is that a bad idea? I always got more spam via the form than the publicly visible address.
My contact form has been through a lot.
Previous entries in the saga:
- SMTP on the edge
- Email: the final form
- I shut the emails out
- I let the emails in
- Progressive dehancement
- PGP encrypted contact form
I quite enjoyed the week in September when I opened a port to a self-hosted SMTP server I coded in 100 lines of TypeScript. The final iteration of my form included true end-to-end encryption. Through trial and error heuristics, I successfully eliminated all spam. (How many false positives I rejected remains unknown…)
My privacy policy which was already simple is now entirely pointless.
Are contact forms just outdated in general? Everyone seems to embed a Calendly widget these days. That’s not my style. I like the tiny bit of additional friction required to send an email. If someone can’t be bothered their message probably wasn’t serious. I’m not looking to maximise meaningless engagement.
I look forward to moving business email to a separate domain. Biggest mistake I ever made was using @dbushell.com for personal and business. Nothing worse than seeing an “urgent” request only to find out on Monday it didn’t matter.
So long old contact form, it was fun!
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