Most of what I like about the internet still arrives by email: a note from a friend, or a reply from a stranger who read something I wrote. So I built two small sites around it, and both are open now. RavenMail lives at theraven.email, and its sibling is theraven.my.

RavenMail takes care of the mail that comes to you. theraven.my takes care of the writing that goes out. They share a raven on the logo and a server, and you can use either one without the other.

theraven.email: a contact form that lands in your inbox #

If you have a personal site, a portfolio or a small project, you probably want people to write to you without putting your address on the page for every scraper to collect. That is the job RavenMail does.

You sign in with a link we send to your email, so there is no password to forget. Then you name a form, add the fields you want and pick its colors for light and dark mode. You can share it as a page of its own, with a link that fits in a bio or an email signature. You can paste one script tag on your site, and the form shows up there and resizes itself. Or you can take an HTML form you already have and point it at RavenMail, with no JavaScript at all.

When someone writes, the message arrives in your inbox with Reply-To set to them, so answering means pressing reply. A copy stays in your dashboard. If you want messages somewhere else too, a form can send them to a JSON webhook, to Discord or to Slack.

There are no plans. Custom fields, attachments, your own CSS, labels in English, Portuguese or Spanish, a list of sites allowed to embed your form: every account gets the same set. Each account can have up to 10 forms and receive 10 messages a day, 250 a month. That covers almost any personal site, and it keeps the email bill small enough for donations to pay.

The form doesn't load anything from Google or Cloudflare. To keep bots away, the visitor's browser solves a short calculation after they press send, about a second on a slow phone, and RavenMail checks the answer. A hidden trap field and a limit on how many messages one connection can send do the rest.

theraven.my: a town where you post by email #

theraven.my is a public blog with no sign-up form, no password and no editor. Your inbox is the whole tool.

To move in, send an email to hello@theraven.email with the name you want in the subject. Write ana, and your house will be at theraven.my/ana. We reply with one question. Answer yes within an hour and your house is open, and the welcome email brings your secret posting address.

To post, write to that address. The subject becomes the title, the body becomes the text, and you can attach up to four images. The post goes up right away and we email you its link. To fix a typo, reply to that email with the corrected text, starting with a line like # New title if the title changes too. To delete the post, reply with the single word delete.

Every resident lives in one of twelve illustrated houses. There is a tower, a lighthouse, a boat, a giant mailbox, a mushroom and seven others, and you choose by sending house followed by its number. All posts meet in the square, which is the front page, and the map shows every house in town. If you read through a feed reader, the square and each house have Atom feeds.

The rest of your account is a word in the subject of an email to hello@theraven.email. Name changes your display name, bio sets the line under it, posts sends you a list of your posts, address gives you a new secret address if the old one leaks, and leave closes your house and deletes your data. Anything that changes your account asks you to confirm by reply before it happens.

Each resident can publish 5 posts a day. Every post has a Report link, and a post that several people report is hidden until someone from staff looks at it.

Where the two meet #

A blog written by email has one gap: readers have no way to write back without knowing your address. theraven.my fills it with RavenMail. Each resident gets a RavenMail form, shown on the house as a Write to button. A reader writes, the message reaches your inbox, and your address stays private. If you want, you can sign in to RavenMail and change that form like any other.