Sorry, I Won’t Give Out That Email Address

There are a few people I have written about over the years who don’t really have much in terms of public contact information. When people are trying to get in touch with someone personally, they often find an article I wrote and try to get their email address.

Take for example, domain investor Gregg Ostrick. Gregg doesn’t seem to have a Facebook or LinkedIn profile, and contacting him directly is apparently difficult. Every month or so, I receive an email from someone asking me to send his email address so they can buy a domain name. Same thing happens from time to time with Frank Schilling and Lonnie Borck. I guess it’s hard to find their personal contact information.

Unfortunately, if you’ve emailed me asking for a colleague’s email address, you are out of luck. I don’t think it is appropriate to give out someone’s contact information. If they wanted to be contacted, I am sure they would make it easier to be in touch.  Depending on the circumstance, I might forward an email along to someone, but I won’t necessarily do that either.

One thing I’ve given up a bit of with my blog is privacy. However, I am not going to give out someone’s email address or phone number, even if I know you. I don’t think it’s the nice thing to do.

Elliot Silver
Elliot Silver
About The Author: Elliot Silver is an Internet entrepreneur and publisher of DomainInvesting.com. Elliot is also the founder and President of Top Notch Domains, LLC, a company that has closed eight figures in deals. Please read the DomainInvesting.com Terms of Use page for additional information about the publisher, website comment policy, disclosures, and conflicts of interest. Reach out to Elliot: Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn

24 COMMENTS

  1. I am the guilty here!

    A pair of weeks ago I kindly asked you the email address of Gregg.

    What is funny is just minutes after you given me this favor I found a series of emails I exchanged with Gregg few years ago, the address was the same! So I may have contacted him without bother you.

    I just checked and it looks Gregg did not respond me. And reading you today it appears he did not appreciated you pass me his email.

    I did not know that Gregg was so secretive so I was transparent and told him Elliot kindly given me his email address to can reach him.

    I apologize Eliot.

    Yes, forward an email is probably the best to do as you never know if the owner don’t want to share his contact. It’s hat I have done many times myself, even if there is few cases with close people you may tend to give the info. But after you may have a bad surprise, so better to stick on this rule.

    Sorry for the hassles Elliot.

  2. Your right elliot, If there offers etc for a domain was that good or of interest to Gregg / FS or others they would reply.

    I know sometime they shall contact re other issues but most people that dont want to be found wont be found.

  3. I totally respect your position Elliot. I had the misfortune of sleeping with a Victorias Secrets model, low and behold news of my prowess leaked and she was having to give me number out to girl after girl.

    The stress nearly killed me.

  4. I was trying to contact the secretary of or get a email address yesterday for Richard Merdinger. The funny thing is nobody at GoDaddy even heard of the guy. Then there was not even a way to send a message to his department or anything. Further research revealed most likely he did not own RichardMerdinger.com and all other TLDs relating to his name were available on the open market.

    Maybe its just me but it seems seriously wrong if you are a major player in the domain industry and don’t even own your own name. Same as being in this business and you don’t even have a spam email address listed as a catchall.

    Hey, if you don’t want people contacting you, no problem, don’t list any contact information and I don’t try to contact. At the same time, forget about the deal too. That is to say, you can expect to let some good deals and or information pass.

    Recently I got contacted with some important info, was glad I had a way for the guy to get in touch. Then there are people in this business who will call you back within minutes of sending them an email, top people.

    • You are right about missing out on deals, but for the most part, the inquiries are dead ends. People with tens of thousands of domain names can tell you that the vast majority of inquiries are for far less than the name is worth or the trouble in transferring.

      Your point is valid though for sure.

  5. Sure it takes seconds to forward the email, but it takes minutes (or more) to read an email, and determine if it’s worthy of passing along, or maybe it’s just spam/lowball offer and the intended recipient would be annoyed with Elliot for sending it to him/her.

    Multiply this potential responsibility by the number of his readership, and you can see how this could become an unnecessary headache. Plus, unless specifically stated otherwise, people generally just don’t like their personal details made available to people they don’t know.

    It’s not fair to Elliot to put this burden on him. He does a wonderful job of sharing his domaining techniques. He shares a lot more than most, and he does it willingly. Be thankful for that.

    My two pennies.

    • My spam sorts out most nonsense in business class email. Then I can go through a hundred emails in minutes. I can tell in the first line, even the title of the mail, if the content is valid.

      Certainly your going to get spam but not having any public address, thats a joke on you. Really, 99% of the people who use WordPress have never even heard of Ma.tt much less bothered to go to his site, and he makes himself available. People like Merdinger have a profile on GoDaddy but no contact. Does Merdinger or anyone at GoDaddy believe they are more important than Ma.tt? How about Richard Branson? To have anyone in this business not have any public contact info is crazy.

    • No, Elliot is not responsible to send anyone elses mail for any reason. No, people should not be contacting Elliot trying to send email to other people. This reveals the nonsense of not having a spam email account, idiots will try to contact you through your business associates email. In the case of Merdinger he is quoted in recent articles so there is the option of contacting the articles writers to forward mail to him. Thats not my style at all but Elliot is having to deal with this nonsense.

      Note to self: Don’t interview anyone who is not willing to supply a public email address at the end of the article.

  6. I mean if Domain King has his email publicly available trough WHOIS, why would anyone else want to really hide? Generally speaking, when you hide you’re indirectly stating that you’re too large to do business with anyone. Open up a bit and get social. The King is King, and he’s doing it right. His LinkedIn profile was the point of contact for the equity sale in Property.com. Lots of opportunities online, and the Internet was meant to be OPEN.

    • Certainly if the Domain King and Richard Branson make themselves available to receive messages tech geeks should be able to handle a few email. Its not like people are going to show up knocking on the door just because they sent you email. This is the nature of the beast, domains, email, tech.

      Elliot, the same people that don’t have public email are around the net doing interviews, being quoted, that is not keeping a low profile. Do you not find it odd that someone like Merdinger only has one domain and cant even be bothered to have a blog or business card there? Here he is helping sell millions of domains, developing domain products, even domain patents. Is a top guy at a company that pumps up instant websites for anyone, yet he has never even spent thirty seconds building a simple site. He evidently has one post on Twitter, hilarious.

    • No, nothing to do with this topic, just the normal spam they mail out. It is funny that that GoDaddy feels comfortable spamming clients on one hand while the other hand tries to protect their own staff from getting spammed or even contacted period, laughing.

  7. It’s all available in the BackWeb anyway…

    No one’s info is 100% unaccessible…

    Depends on the levels of entry you have at your fingertips into the backweb world . . .

    ~Patricia – DomainBELL

    • Yea, you can dig up about anything but who wants to bother with that. If its a legitimate player they should have some kind of contact info available.

      I have said recently, I will not even work with anyone that does not own their own name dot com and at least have a blog there. I understand if your name is joe smith and you missed the boat to joe smith dot com but a simple search should still result in you finding a site joe smith generic dot com.

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