Contact

You can e-mail me at colin@helvensteijn.com.

Other means of contacting me

You could add helvensteijn@gmail.com to your Windows Live/MSN Messenger or Google Talk/Jabber contact list, but I’m not very often online there. For better chances of running into me, connect to the MetaD IRC network and look for a user nicknamed raptor. I can be found there almost every day. Other contact information, such as my postal address or phone number, can be obtained (with sufficiently good reason) by e-mail.

Spam protection

These days, it is no longer safe to put an e-mail address on a web page in plain text. Programs exist that crawl the web in search for e-mail addresses, with the sole purpose of spamming their mailboxes. Therefore, I have protected e-mail addresses on this web site against these so-called spam bots.

It involves no more than inserting <span style="display:none">-NOSPAM-</span> (or use a class instead of inline styles) in one or more places in the address. Spam bots will no longer recognize a valid e-mail address, and even if they do, they wouldn’t know that the -NOSPAM- parts ought to be removed.

To make things easier for real humans who actually want to e-mail me, I’ve made a simple JavaScript function that removes the -NOSPAM- parts from e-mail addresses and turns them into normal clickable links. Users with JavaScript disabled will have to copy & paste the address and remove the -NOSPAM- parts if the browsers includes those (some do, some don’t).

Digital signature / Strange attachment named smime.p7m

If you receive an e-mail from me with an attachment named smime.p7m, it means your e-mail client does not support digital signing of e-mails. I recently started signing all my e-mails with my personal S/MIME certificate (issued by StartSSL).

The purpose of such digital signatures is authentication, non-repudiation and security. In other words, if you receive an e-mail with a valid digital signature, you can be sure that the e-mail really came from the person who claims to have sent it, and it wasn’t tampered with while in transit.

The security part comes in when both parties involved own a certificate and both parties have the others public key. That enables both parties to encrypt all e-mails sent between them, so nobody else can eavesdrop on the communication.

To obtain my S/MIME certificate, simply request it by e-mail. I’ll reply with a signed message and you’ll be able to import the certificate into your client. You might need import the StartSSL root certificate into your client before my certificate will be considered valid, depending on your client.