This is an excellent point. Perhaps putting your preferences on your email signature, your profile on the corporate intranet, or your personal website's 'conta

This is an excellent point. Perhaps putting your preferences on your email signature, your profile on the corporate intranet, or your personal website's 'contact me' page would be helpful. Also, it can be good to explicitly define a company culture. I've worked in some places where I'd receive "VERY URGENT" emails, and others where email was used merely as a 'cover your arse' policy but everything else was done in person. FWIW, I prefer to have a conversation in person (or over the phone) and follow this up with an email - even for very short conversations. I like to be prodded via SMS. I hate IM (short conversations turn into long conversations that I can't search later), don't use Facebook or Twitter. But only about 10% of my conversations happen in the way I want them to.