When I was heavily involved in the NASCAR sim community about 5 years ago, I moderated a very popular forum. Through this I acquired the email addresses of at least 20 drivers that have competed at the Sprint Cup level including a couple of champions and the most popular driver in NASCAR. I still have their email addresses in my Outlook address book.
Sure, if you’ve got something to hide.
I’m envisioning a lot of “whitelisting” where emails to $celebrity will only get through if they’re either from a pre-defined list of approved addresses, or if they include a specific keyword in the subject line or text. (The password for July is “39buzzingbeez”)
With most ISPs, this is pretty easy to set up so unworthy emails are silently trashed at the ISP’s servers before coming down the line to your computer.
Frighteningly, that 4 million emails per day figure for Bill Gates is four years out of date, and I’d be willing to guess it’s closer to seven or eight million a day now.
Dale Earnhardt Sr. still has email? :eek:
Yeah, but he has it forwarded to his afterlife.com address. :dubious: 
You’ll trip across a number of writers out here on the intertubes - for example, I’m in the same snark community as one of my favorite sci-fi/fantasy writers (whom I embarrassingly fangirlled over for a moment when I realized that it was actually her. She politely forgave me and told the story of how she did the same thing the first time she met Heinlein). There are famous romance writers who show up on Smart Bitches. And there’s a moderately famous and award winning fantasy writer who travels in the same fandom circles I do, though she tries to keep her real name pretty secret.
Vaguely related, Curt Schilling is a huge video game geek, and he has been showing up as a regular on one of the biggest World of Warcast podcasts, The Instance, for a while now.
That’s great. It still doesn’t give him permission to never answer me though.
Now that he’s not working full-time at Microsoft, he just might answer your email.
I’ve found I’ve been able to contact several fairly prominent authors via their websites. I haven’t tried that many, but several mystery writers, fantasy writers, sci-fi writers… if the author has a website and you send an email, you may just get a reply.
Heck, while on my honeymoon in Maui several years ago, I was reading one of Lawrence Block’s HitList books – about a professional hitman – and someone drowned near our hotel in a manner eerily reminiscent of the way a character was killed in the book.
I sent off a quick email to Mr. Block informing him of this, and shortly afterwards received a reply with an apology that his killer was interfering with my honeymon.
OK, he’s not at the level of a Bill Gates or movie star, but he’s still better known than I am. =)
This would be my guess, too. I remember reading somewhere that Donny Osmond’s close friends knew to put his initials on the envelope in some special way so they’d go straight to Donny without being opened by his staff.
What? They had email in the 70s?
For what it’s worth, I just emailed the Pope. Just checking in, you know.
I imagine he’ll never actually see it, but what the heck. Maybe we’ll become pals!
That is so cool. You might have passed Keller in the lobby at one point!
I’ve gotten e-mail responses from Scott Adams, Robert J. Sawyer, Larry Niven, Orson Scott Card, Tim Dorsey, and several other authors that I can’t recall at the moment. They’ve all been pretty darn friendly.
Post: Average.
User name: Not bad.
Combination: Priceless.
I’ve received email responses over the years from: Rosie O’Donnell, John Grisham, Scott Adams, Keith Knight, Bill Gates and RuPaul.
Now THERE’S a dinner party guest list, eh?
And look what happened to him.