Does your forum have an email account that people can contact? How often do you check it?
My forum has two. One general email that everyone can contact, the MyBB contact form submissions are sent to it, etc.. I then have my own forum email if someone wants to contact me directly. I check them once a week through cPanel, but I have yet to find an email program I really like (I'm using Squirrel Mail or something like that 😛 ) and there's always a ton of spam that doesn't get caught by the filters. How do you prevent email spam through cPanel?
I just use one of my personal email addresses to receive the emails. I always forget to check email addresses on custom domains so there is no point of having one of them for me. If I started to get too many emails about my forum through the contact form then I would likely set up a custom email for it.
I will usually have a [email protected] for any of my forums. But if I don't, I will just use a personal email of mine. Usually that email forwards to me.
I always had a "support" email which was [email protected], however it wasn't really used, nor did I check it often. Our support board, (which was open to guests at the time) was used instead of the email, and overall the support board was much easier to handle than checking my email all the time. It also allowed all the staff to chime in on support threads rather than just one using an email, or rather me trusting my staff with the credentials of the email account. 😛
I have a Google apps for business account setup that forwards all my email to one account. Each of my sites has a few addresses, such as community@ and contact@, but most go to the same place.
I employ a handful of ways for folk to contact the team when managing a community. Email is just one channel the memberbase can take advantage of. That said, I don't ever remember using it. It's usually through social media or publicly in support-focused forums. I always find it easier for a registered account to either fire a PM or use the designated section, as opposed to firing up their email client, filling out necessary details and then filling in the body.
