Frequently Asked Questions

What's this site all about, then?

It's a place where people can share useful information about how to contact large and often faceless organisations.

Where does the information on this site come from?

You. Well, not necessarily you personally (although it could be), but you, the Internet users, in general.

Why not just look up the information on the organisation website, Yellow Pages, etc?

Well, you can, in many cases. But often, organisations don't make it easy to find the relevant information. For example, they may want to force you to use a web-based form to contact them, rather than phone or email, or they may only publish a single phone number rather than direct lines to individual departments.

Why can't I just click on the email addresses in the listings? And why are they in a funny format?

There are three main reasons why organisations often don't put email addresses on their websites. One of these reasons is sheer corporate arrogance - they simply want you to do things their way, instead of being free to choose. That's a bad reason. It's part of why this site exists. But the other two reasons are actually very good ones.

For a start, email addresses on websites are very likely to end up being harvested by spambots, and no-one wants to get spam. Customer service departments with public email addresses get loads of spam, and it gets in the way of dealing with genuine enquiries from customers. So we only publish email addresses in a form which isn't likely to make them get picked up by spammers.

Secondly, many - maybe even most - people really are very bad at writing emails. If you've ever worked in a customer service or technical support department, you'll know what I mean! Not just bad spelling and grammar, but simply forgetting even the most basic things such as including your account number, order number, address, etc when making a query. Not to mention sending emails in horribly mangled formats with lots of HTML, attachments and other unwanted stuff. Again, this makes it a lot harder for the people on the receiving end to help you. So another part of the reason for using a munged address format on this site is a very rudimentary ability test - if you can't work out how to use the email addresses we provide, or find it too awkward or timeconsuming to dcode them, then you probably shouldn't be using email at all. Try a web form, or phoning, instead.

For more information on how to write a good email, see our email tips page.

I've got another question that isn't answered here. What do I do?

You can contact us directly, but it's also a good idea to use the forum for any other questions. That way, other people can see the answers as well.