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 or Google Talk 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

I have protected my e-mail address against spam bots that harvest e-mail addresses off web sites to spam them. The method used is fairly simple yet quite effective. It involves putting <span style="display:none">-NOSPAM-</span> (or use a class instead of inline styles) in one or more places in the address. Spam bots won’t recognize it as a valid e-mail address. :)

In this case, a simple JavaScript function removes those spans from the e-mail address and turns it into a normal clickable link. 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).

You might need import the StartSSL root certificate into your client before my certificate will be considered valid, depending on your client. You can be pretty sure that any e-mail from me with a valid digital signature really came from me and wasn’t tampered with while in transit.

An added advantage is that if you own an S/MIME certificate yourself, once you have mine, you can encrypt any future e-mails to me so it’ll be impossible for others to read the contents. This of course also works vice versa.

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.