I'm not a fan of e-mail and text, period. But phone contact has always been available and valuable to me. I think all contact has a practical side, and the logistics of it need to be made clear--how to contact, times, and response options. And I agree that "in an emergency" isn't really helpful because the line is ambiguous when you're in the middle of it. My T's answering service always asked if it were an emergency, and I'd never know what to say. My T told me to just say that I needed to speak with him. Made life a lot simpler. But beyond that, contact represents a need, and I don't think it's productive to try to regulate need. Unmet needs will and should show themselves in the course of the therapy process; squelching them can be counter productive. But I think it helps to recognize that any shortcoming in response--timing, content, whatever--may feel like rejection, but more often than not, is not rejection. It seems like a lot of the anxiety experienced around "boundary issues" comes from conflating what it feels like with what it is.