Woah, this is sickening.

unplugged off-gridders fucked
If you live off-grid outside of Denmark, wtf.. what happens to your letter when it is sent to a Danish address in 2026? Will every national postal service worldwide have to negotiate a contract with FedEx? Extra sick: FedEx is a hard-right GOP-supporting ALEC org that ships slave dolphins, hunting trophies, and shark fins. UPS is also an ALEC member. So if you boycott both, then what? Maybe you get lucky and live in a country that does a deal with DHL (assuming they operate in DK).

e-mail is still broken
I sent a critically important time-sensitive e-mail to a Danish landlord. The recipient’s e-mail service accepted my email for delivery, then silently sent it to a spam folder. The asshole dip-shit landlord argued it was my fault they did not receive my email message in their inbox. WTF? How can a sender possibly control what the recipient’s mail server does with a message after the SMTP transaction is

Mail servers no longer simply accept RFC-compliant email. Thanks to Google, Microsoft, and Spamhaus, when you are forced to send an email you are forced through a series of arbitrary hurdles and obsticles imposed by the recipient. Every hurdle is an attack on your personal freedom and autonomy. It’s an attack on your control over what info you disclose to who.

This guide is for a few (perhaps rare) circumstances:

• You are expected to send an email to a person or org, e.g. per a legal obligation, but you would rather not give in to email-pushers who at the same time impose hurdles on email acceptance (network non-neutrality).
• You have missed a deadline to send an email and need a good excuse for missing the deadline.
• You are going to send a snail mail to an org for whatever reason. If you are taking the time to send them a letter anyway, might as well nitpick their mail server and add a log showing a refusal by their overly defensive mail server, just to drive the point that email

In most cases, when you are objectionably forced to supply an email address, the solution is to walk and take your business elsewhere. But what about the cases where you are trapped because you are forced (e.g. by law) into an interaction that demands an email address?

We need a fix. One idea is to designate a few universally shared email addresses for everyone to use:

1. something like [email protected], which simply rejects all connections. The rejection message from the mail server would be a lengthy canned response that mansplains to the sender: “You unreasonably demanded an email address from someone who objects under GDPR Art.18 to that kind of processing. Please note we kept a copy of your attempt and will serve as witness to the data subject’s express Art.18-protected objection.” (edit: would also be useful to detect the sending server’s ownership, and if MS or Google add an extra blurb about objections to surveillance advertising)
2. something like `blindverify

I wanted to talk to someone at a law firm in a big office building. Accessing the building required badging in. I said to the security staff I wanted to visit a law firm in that building. They said I must register on a touchpad. The form required my name, phone number, and email address, which had red asterisks -- required fields and grayed out button until they were filled. I entered bogus info and got a visitor badge.

Got an email from a bank saying my account has been put in a restricted state because they have been unable to reach me. Their emails reach me fine. They rarely send paper mail but when they do I can see that they have the correct address on file.

Then I looked closer at their email, examined the HTML, and found that they insert a tracker pixel in their messages. So if I were to use a graphical mail client with default configs, they would surreptitiously get a signal telling them my IP (thus whereabouts) and time of day every time I open my email from them. I use a text client so the tracker pixels get ignored.

Would a bank conclude from lack of tracker pixels signals that they are not reaching a customer, and then lock down their account?

I’m not going to call them and ask.. fuck them for interrupting my day and making me dance. I don’t lick boots like that. I just wonder if anyone else who does not trigger tracker pixels has encountered this situation.

An insurance agent who I called on the phone for a quote demanded my email address. I resisted, said he could have my fax number instead. He said the form he is filling out in order to get me a quote will not move forward without an email address. I got the impression this was not a requirement of the agent but rather the underwriting company, which means no matter which agent sells me the policy it’s impossible to get insurance from that underwriter without an email address. I would be denied insurance with this underwriter had I not supplied an email address in a phone conversation. They assume if you have access to a phone line, you have email.

So I gave him a disposable. This is still not an okay solution. The quote he sent by email traversed Microsoft servers and contained sensitive information without encryption. It doesn’t matter that MS did not get my real email address considering they still got lots of personal info about me from the quote.

It’s also interesting to no