Contact Josh

There are a few ways to contact me. Click on a method for more details about it.

Email: hello@josh.life

This is my incoming email address if you’re contacting me for the first time. My response time can be fairly slow, and I currently might reply with another address. I way prefer email over text messages because I can actually type at a keyboard. Oh, and you can send attachments without loss of quality like in SMS.

This isn’t a particularly secure way to contact me, as I haven’t set up GPG/PGP for encrypted emails for this address yet. In the mean time if you need that you can either use Signal or mail me a letter.
Signal: jmm.01

Signal is an end-to-end encrypted messaging service, and as such it’s one of the more secure ways to contact me (maybe only competing with US mail). If you want to text me, you should do it through Signal. It’s also got encrypted voice and video chat. I use it on a daily basis with a lot of my family and friends. It’s so usable that I think people may have forgotten that it’s encrypted. You can also use my non-toll-free telephone number to add me.

I can still be fairly slow to respond, and for long-form communication I tend to prefer email as it’s easier to sort and more interoperable across different clients.
Telephone (toll‑free): +1 (844) JOSHUA-M

Yes, calling me on this number actually works (most of the time). As of November 2025, I can receive SMS (but no MMS) messages on this number too, though if you’re going that route you should try emailing instead, if that’s possible for you. I currently can’t reply to text messages, so I might just call you.

Calling this number from a payphone does not work. It used to, but payphone surcharges increased to 50¢, then $1.00, and eventually my provider stopped accepting payphone calls completely. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ (November 2025 update: My provider has reinstated the ability to accept payphone calls but I haven’t reenabled this yet.)
Fax: +1 (650) 887-5777

I’ve got a fax number as well, if you need or want that. Maybe you’re sending health documents, or maybe you’re in Japan (I hear they still use it, which honestly sounds fun). It’s my phone number minus 11. Right now it basically just goes to email.
Telephone: +1 (650) 887-5788

Feel free to call this number. I’m fine getting phone calls^*. I even made this number easy to remember: the local part of the number (8875788) is a palindrome.

If you want to send text messages, photos, or video chat, you can also use this number to contact me via Signal, an end-to-end encrypted messaging service.

Text messages are not received. As of November 2025, due to changes with “A2P 10DLC” rules, I can’t actually receive SMS messages here anymore. Weirdly, it used to be that I couldn’t receive messages on my toll-free number and now I can only receive them on my toll-free number. But send me email instead.

* Unless you’re a telemarketer.
Mail
2342 Shattuck Avenue #904
Berkeley, CA 94704-1517
USA

Yup, you can contact me through the United States Postal Service. Check out my page on mail. I know a lot of people wouldn’t make this information public, but I think it’s our only constitutionally protected form of telecommunication. Since that’s important to me, I believe it’s worth some of the risk. I enjoy sending postcards and other mail, and I have a decent stack of stationery and stamps so I am able to reply to you (though like everything else, I may be slow).

There are some ways you should not contact me, mostly because I no longer check them.

Matrix

As of November 2025, I no longer use Matrix on a daily basis. At one point, it was probably the best way to contact me for real-time communication. Although I appreciate that it has end-to-end encryption, photos, files, group messages, and video chat, I think some parts of the data model have issues with scaling. This is especially true since most people just use the matrix.org homeserver instead of their own. The Matrix client Element became pretty slow for me, and also dropped a lot of notifications, to the point that I’ve basically stopped using it for now. If I spin up my own homeserver at some point I may use it again. There are still many tech communities that use it for group chats.
Facebook

I might go years without checking it. A friend once asked for travel recommendations to Shanghai and I didn’t see it until two years later.
WeChat

My Chinese phone is old, slow, and usually turned off. Unfortunately, messages that don’t get delivered for a few months can get dropped completely, meaning I may not see messages at all.
AIM

Hahaha. No one’s asked, and I don’t think anybody I know used it by the time I graduated high school. I don’t have Pidgin installed anymore either.
Yahoo Messenger

Yahoo deleted my emails after I forgot to log in for a year. Yahoo also deleted my (and everyone’s) GeoCities. :-(