Well, I was trying to avoid the trivial details of this ... let's see if I can be concise...
A friend of mine has some professional contacts in Buenos Aires and she wanted to get us connected. She e-mailed them and sent them MY email address. One of them has contacted me several times over the past two days. Yesterday, she sent another email to them (copied me), not knowing that Luis had already been in touch with me. Her email was in Spanish, so I answered her in Spanish.
But when I first wrote her, I said "Luis me ha contactado..." Then, later in the afternoon, I happened to be listening to a podcast (based in Madrid) where they said something like "We don't use 'contactar' like the English 'to contact'. We say 'ponerse en contacto'." But then they didn't really elaborate.
So I was looking it up at a different Spanish language discussion forum, and it seemed to me that it would be better to say "ponerse en contacto" than what I said. I just couldn't figure out who the "se" is.....