IM etiquette

Just a quick note.  This is an issue that has come up again and again, so I want to tackle it right now.  IMs are pretty much dead with the advent of Facebook chat, however some of us still run our instant messenger clients occasionally.  There are a lot of spam IMs created by scripts.  These are pretty interesting, but they tend to annoy people who thought they were real people and turn out to be tools for delivering porn-site advertising links.  Because these exist, people like me just block unrequested chat requests.  This may be disappointing for those who want to contact for legitimate reasons.  The way to get through is to specifically ask for something the recipient would recognise as being aimed at them specifically.  “I saw your post on the forum,” is generic.  “I saw your post on the rat-bike forum and I have the starter you were looking for,” is specific and might be approved.  “I am a zither player and I would like to ask what you think about zithers in your genre,” is specific enough.  All the others will be suspected spam and will be ignored.