It is a fact of life now on the Internet, that if I post my e-mail address in any place where legitimate people such as you can find it, such as in my résumé (r{e'}sum{e'}) or on my Web site, spammers will find it there too, and use it to flood me with spam. This has indeed happened to me. I currently suffer more than two hundred spam per day, making it impossible for me to find your legitimate e-mail among all that spam, unless you do something to unambiguously distinguish your e-mail from the spam.

One thing you can do is to tag your e-mail with a special keyword in the Subject field, which will cause your e-mail to be diverted to a special mailbox folder separate from where the spam accumulates. At present, that special keyword is ReSpam2002Jan08. I usually check my e-mail several times per week, often in the late morning, and if anything new is in that special folder I'll read it right away. (If it's in any other folder, with some of the spam, I might skip it and never see it, or I might never even glance at the folder containing your one e-mail hidden amongst two thousand or more spam.) With that special keyword included in your e-mail, it goes in a special folder that never gets any spam, so I'll be able to easily find your e-mail the next time I check my e-mail, which is likely to be some morning (California time) during the next several days after you send your e-mail, or if you let me know to check sooner (see next paragraph).

Update 2008.Apr.10: I've gotten an account on SpamGourmet, whereby I can enable fake e-mail addresses that will automatically forward only a specific number of e-mail to my regular address before the fake address is closed. All such forwarded e-mail has the SpamGourmet keyword in the header, so it's easy for me to find all of it, and you won't need the special keyword in the Subject field to separate your e-mail from spam. But this works only for initial contacts, before the message-count is used up, so I'm not sure if it'll be any better than the old keyword-in-Subject-field method. Anyway, here's today's temporary fake e-mail address: web3.3.CalRobert@SpamGourmet.com. Be sure to save a local backup copy of your message, in case something goes wrong. If e-mail to that address is rejected, or if I don't reply within a couple days, change the number after the word "web" to some larger number, like maybe three or four random digits, to create a new fake address, and see whether that works. If it works, re-send your backup copy of message.

After sending me e-mail in either way described above, if you'd like me to see your e-mail sooner than the next morning, within a few minutes if I'm online at the moment, otherwise the very next time I log in during the same day, you can try my simple-to-use instant-alert Web service.
If you don't yet have your own individual account on my Web site (likely if you are contacting me for the first time):
username guest1, password free.
After logging in, click on the first button to see if I'm currently online (so you'll know whether the alert will be instant or next-time-Robert-logs-in), then click on the next button to send me the alert, and select options for when and how you sent me the e-mail so I'll know what to look for.

After you've sent me an instant-alert, be sure to check if I'm online. If I am, I might send you an instant reply within a few minutes. To see it, simply go back to the screen that has the instant-alert form you filled out, re-load the Web page, or if you lost that screen then go back to the main menu showing instant-alert and click on that again, and the message-text field in the instant-alert form will contain your previous message, minus any part I've deleted (after copying to a private local file), plus any reply I've manually edited into it during the time since you sent it. If you don't see any reply, but I'm definitely online, try reloading that page every couple minutes or so to see if I finally do respond there.

If the matter is urgent, we can go back and forth like that, using the instant-alert and instant-reply as a crude "chat" room. But note that nothing you say to me or I say back is confidential when you are using the public guest1 account. If you want your own private account, first make sure I'm interested in that, and if so then e-mail me the account name and password you want, then send me an instant alert that you've sent me the e-mail, then check the instant-reply for me to say that I've set up the account, then go back to the login form to try it. Do not include your desired account+password in a instant alert from guest1, for obvious reasons.

Older list of (additional) ways to contact me

Note that most of the above is only so that I will see your e-mail. But because anyone, including you, can forge somebody else's e-mail addres in the From: field of the e-mail you send me, I might not feel comfortable replying to your e-mail, because I don't really know and trust that the person (you) who sent that e-mail is the same person who will receive any reply that I might send to that e-mail address. So if you want me to reply, you need to verify your e-mail address by joining this Yahoo! Group then posting a message citing something you said in your previous e-mail to me to confirm that message really was written by the person whose e-mail address was confirmed as part of the Group-joining process. A more detailed explanation is here. Note that I don't check that Group very often, so after you've sent your original e-mail then joined the Group and posted your hello message, you may need to send me yet another e-mail or instant-alert to remind me to check the Group to see that you've posted there.