The one positive aspect from having a blog site, and being an author is the occasional person who decides to write you an email out of the blue. The first time it happened was back in 2017, I had written a blog post about a One-Time-Pad encryption method for tiny low power micro-controllers, I was a bit of fun, and a bit out of my league, but even I knew that the OTP was the most secure encryption method if done correctly with a perfectly randomly key. I exchanged a few friendly emails with a guy who was at Stockholm University doing mathematics as my blog post coincided with some work he was doing in the same area. I never changed my post but he did let me know there were more efficient OTP methods, he was developing along the same line.
Since then, another 24 people have gotten through my pretty aggressive spam filters, and I always look forward to reading them, and I always save and reply to them; Most of the guys I am still in contact with even today, though we are ever likely to meet in person as they are scattered around the globe.
Unfortunately about 99.9% of the emails I receive still go to spam, and while I occasionally trawl through the detritus to look for anything obviously not spam, I am becoming more reluctant to do so as the AI spam has gotten more targeted, and the penalties for opening one, much more dire.
Spam was probably the first enshittification event for the internet, and we have fought a running battle over the past thirty years to control it, but spam is also becoming one I am less able to deal with. Because of this, my email filtering is an area I am soon about to automate away onto another computer and on to an isolated sandbox. All future emails will be read and simply checked for no links or code attachments, the contents will be matched against my own defined filters, and then the AI will convert them to text for me and summarize my daily inbox so I can better see what is there and reply or not. Forgive me if I don’t put any details of this here, as it will defeat the object of the exercise, but I am sure many of you could implement a similar scheme with little effort.
I really hope this is going to work, and if you are one of the ones who have written in the past, to just say Hi, or let me know a typo or inaccuracy in an article or book, and who never got a reply, then I hope you did not take it personally.
