To Contact Unshake

The main Email addresses for Unshake have always been "unshake (at) hamangia.freeserve.co.uk" for general communications about Unshake, such as bugs and suggestions, and "ozymandias (at) hamangia.freeserve.co.uk" for official communications. Over the last two years, however, these addresses have become so clogged with spam that I can no longer guarantee that I will receive Emails sent to them. Carry on using them for a while if you want, but I fear that they will eventually become useless.

So I have hatched a plan, which might keep one Email channel free. The new address is unshake@unshake.co.uk, but messages on this channel will be rejected, unless they contain a certificate generated by Unshake, either as the Subject or in the plain-text body of the message. (If you are not sure what encoding you are using for the body of your message, make the certificate the subject.)

In order to send a message, just run Unshake and click the "Mail Cert." button. This will open a window containing a string of characters which you can paste into your Email message. This certificate will be valid for 5 days. Make sure the clock is right on your computer!

This is a very simple system, there's no point in being sophisticated when anyone can run the code to generate a certificate, but I doubt a spammer would bother to do that, so I can easily reject spam automatically without worrying that a "spam-filter" might reject genuine messages.

21/7/2003 WET.