svenska

Rombobjörn

How to send me email

My address

My email address is Bjorn@Rombobjörn.se. If your email program thinks that address is invalid, you can use Bjorn@Rombobeorn.se instead. Don't miss the conditions below.

Cryptography

The world is full of snoopers who want to ransack other people's private correspondence and chart who corresponds with whom. They may be anything from multinational spy combines to prying neighbours and total strangers across the world. In order to keep at least the contents of the messages private I ask you to encrypt them. For that you need Gnu Privacy Guard (GnuPG), Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) or some other program that complies with the OpenPGP standard. You also need my PGP key to encrypt with. It's also good if the encryption can be handled in the email program, so that encrypting won't be a nuisance. For many popular email programs there are plugins available to integrate them with GnuPG or PGP.

Keep in mind that OpenPGP encryption protects only the contents of the message. The message header is not encrypted, so the sender and recipient addresses and the subject line are not protected against espionage. In the OpenPGP/MIME format the text and any attachments are encrypted. In the legacy PGP format only the text is encrypted, not the attachments.

Encryption is also useful for making sure that your messages will reach me, but it's not mandatory. You can reach me by unencrypted email too. This brings us to the next point:

Special conditions

Spammers are undoubtedly the most abominable scum ever to besmirch this planet. To keep them out of my inbox I've been forced to set up some special conditions for people who want to send email to me. To make sure that your message won't be rejected, take at least one of these measures:

Use a known sender address.
If I have sent email to you, then your address is known on my server. The server will accept your message if you use that address for sender address.
Reply to a message from me.
If you can't use a known sender address, then you can instead write your message as a reply to a message from me. Open a message that I have sent and select "Reply" or a similar command in your email program. Your message will then be tagged as a reply to my message, and so my server will accept it. It is of course best to do this only when your message actually is a reply to the one I wrote. (This might not work if your email program is one of the very crappiest.)
Encrypt the message.
In addition to preserving the privacy of correspondence, encryption is also a means to ensure that your message will reach me. My server accepts all messages that are encrypted with my PGP key. The legacy PGP format is acceptable but I prefer OpenPGP/MIME.
Sign the message.
My server accepts all messages that are cryptographically signed in accordance with OpenPGP/MIME, S/MIME or the legacy PGP format.
Use a password.
If you can't use any of the methods above, then there's a special password that you can use. Add the word "Anacreon" at the end of the subject line. By doing so you show that you are human and have read and understood these instructions, and so my server will accept your message.

Furthermore, all messages shall be correctly formed in accordance with the standards for email. You won't normally need to worry about this if you have a reasonably sane email program, but if your messages are rejected despite meeting at least one of the requirements above, then a defect in your email program may be the cause. That should then be clear from the error message in the bounce message you get.

Why all this trouble?

Why do I complicate the matter in this way? Why don't I use a spam filter like everyone else?

Spam filters cause a continual arms race. The filter developers try to make the filters smarter, while the spammers try to fool or sabotage the filters and also send out more and more spam so that the small fraction that slips through the filter still becomes an unacceptably large amount. All spam filters also sometimes err in the other direction, so that they discard some fraction of the legitimate messages, and they typically don't inform the sender when they discard a message. The only way to defeat the spammers is to do something about the root cause, which is that sending email to stangers is too easy and too cheap. This is what I do with my conditions. A real human being can meet the conditions without too much effort. Many people won't even notice them. To a spammer, on the other hand, it will be too troublesome to meet the conditions just to reach one more victim.

The advantage to you as a sender is that you have the means to ensure that your message will reach me instead of just hoping that it won't get eaten by a capricious spam filter. My server accepts all messages that meet the conditions, and those that it doesn't accept, it rejects with an error message. If a rejected message wasn't spam but a legitimate message, then the rejection will result in a bounce message to the sender with the error message in it. The sender will therefore know that the message was rejected, and can take one of the measures above. (I can of course not guarantee that messages won't disappear before they reach my server, or that bounce messages won't disappear on the way back, as there may be filters somewhere else along the way.)

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