Stop trying to scam me!

The short version: the studio has a public email address, and almost nobody who writes to it is real.

hello@kleosvic.com is the address on the contact page. It exists for exactly one reason, which is that somebody might one day need to reach the person who builds kleosvic. In practice, the inbox has filled up with a very particular kind of mail, and none of it comes from a user.

What actually arrives

Three species.

The first is the subcontractor. Someone has found the site, decided the studio is a company with a payroll, and would like to be on it. The message is polite and slightly too long and explains that they are a team of experienced developers with ten years of Flutter experience who would love to help with the project. Sometimes they attach a portfolio. Sometimes the portfolio is the same as three other portfolios I have already been sent.

The second is the lawyer. This one is my favourite, because the story never survives its own details. There is an inheritance, a client, a legal matter that requires a trustworthy foreign partner, and a name in the signature that does not match the name in the body and does not match the country in the address. The sums are always large and the ask is always small, which is the whole trick.

The third is the bank. A bank, in a country I have never visited, on behalf of a person I have never met, has located funds that belong to me and needs my help to move them. I do not know why these still work on anybody. I assume they work on somebody, or they would have stopped sending them.

Why it is more annoying than it sounds

At first it is funny. Then it is a tax.

The problem is not one email. The problem is that every one of them is written to sound like it might be real, so you have to read it far enough to be sure, and reading it far enough to be sure is the work. An inbox that is mostly noise is an inbox you stop opening, and an inbox you stop opening is the same as not having one.

That is what actually costs something. The address is no longer a channel. It is a filter I have to run by hand.

I handed the inbox to someone else

So I asked a friend to take it.

That sentence undersells it. He has been around the project long enough that he is now a partner in it, and he is the one designing the next app. Giving him the mailbox was not delegating a chore to a stranger. It was admitting that the part of kleosvic I like least is still a part that has to happen, and that I am the wrong person to do it, because I keep reading the fake lawyers for fun and then complaining that I have no time.

Now the scam mail goes to him, and he blocks it and does not forward it to me, and the inbox is quieter. That is the arrangement, and I am not going to pretend it is a triumph. It is a workaround.

The part that is actually sad

Here is the number I keep coming back to.

In all the time hello@kleosvic.com has existed, I have not received a single real email through it. Not one. No bug report from a user. No question from someone who installed Kleos Music and got stuck. No message from a person who wanted to say it was good, or bad, or that a screen was broken.

The address that exists so that people can reach the studio has only ever been reached by people who want to take money from it.

I do not think that means the app is bad. I think it means the app is small, and small has a sound, and the sound is silence in an inbox you were excited to set up.

What I am doing about it

Nothing clever.

The address stays. The filter runs. If you are a real person with a real question about Kleos Music, or about the studio, or about the fact that a sixteen-year-old is running it, you will get through, because a human reads those, and it is not the people offering the inheritance.

And if you are about to email me offering to be subcontracted: I have a partner now, and he is not going to hand it over.