Email?

[Leucadian]

How do you contact other hounds to discuss off topic matters? It would be nice to have a 'blind' forwarding service just for passing some limited info to each other without exposing it to a public forum. I dislike putting my email in a posting, but that seems to be the only option. I tried putting it in the bio and then taking it down, but that didn't seem to work. Besides, I still wound up with chatty messages telling the other person to look here or there, and then email me. I could get a specific junk email address, but that doesn't appeal to me either, and it still clutters up the board. How do others handle this?

[embee]

Although I haven't done this, you could add an email address to any of the "my Chow" optional fields. I would strongly recommend that you use a free service such as gmail and change it if excessive spam starts to arrive at that address. Do NOT use your "real" personal email address, as you will eventually come to regret it.

[Robert Lauriston]

I use my real personal address (as I have for ten years), but I route it through Gmail, which does an excellent job of filtering out spam.

[Chris VR]

I've used the same address for my Chowound email for almost 5 years and I don't have any problems. I have pretty good spam filtering though.

[Robert Lauriston]

Get a Google Gmail account. They have a very effective spam filter.

http://mail.google.com/mail/signup

[River Rat]

Agree it would be good to have the option of sending a private message. The other site (not a food one) I regularly visit has this option and it is very useful.

[ahr]

Try Googling their Chowhound user name, so long as it's reasonably distinctive. You may find that they also post on another national or regional web site, possibly not even food-related, which has a built-in e-mail or personal-messaging system. You can even try Googling some key snippet from one of their posts, on the chance that they've posted the same thing on another site or in a personal blog.

[smoky]

I second this motion. There's a person I'd really like to be able to contact, but there doesn't seem to be any way to do it. I agree that this would be a great feature.