Warning from eBay:

[toledo_mudhen]

You were tagged by they their increasingly sophisticated auto bots. Nothing to do with the guy on other end.

So yea - it appears the easy thing to do is include phone number in listing - Who Knew?

BTW - I have in the past, been able to send contact info via messaging system in the form of pic (JPEG, GIF, etc)

[clydepepper]

I have about sixty business cards for seller with whom I have dealt. Most of them contain non-EBAY contact details.

Once again, the low-tech approach has it's day.

[ALR-bishop]

Many sellers have their own web sites with contact info.

[D. Bergin]

Yup, as everybody else says, the bots pick it up.

It's getting harder and harder to even send legitimate messages through Ebay without getting a warning.

Just somebody asking a general question about an item you have up for auction, and you have to be careful not to reference your website, any other sites that might have information for them on that item, your contact info, anybody else's contact info that might help them corroborate information.

If it's somebody I've done business with before, I usually just look for a Paypal e-mail address on file to respond to them properly.