Legal
Privacy policy
This site is a pure information offering. It sets no cookies, includes no external services and processes no personal data — with one exception: when you write to us.
Translation. This is a courtesy translation of the German Datenschutzerklärung. In case of doubt the German version prevails.
Legal framework. This site is operated from Germany and is subject to the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the German Federal Data Protection Act. All article references are to the GDPR. Anyone visiting this site from a country outside the EU has the same rights — they follow from where the processing takes place, not from where the data subject lives.
1. Controller
Ralf Schwab
Anna-Lauter-Straße 11
76137 Karlsruhe, Germany
Email: kontakt@mailv1.com
No data protection officer has been appointed; a private site of this size does not meet the conditions requiring one.
2. What this site does not do
For clarity, first what does not happen here:
- No cookies. Neither our own nor anyone else's, neither technically necessary ones nor any others. The contact form manages without as well.
- No analytics or tracking tools. No statistics service, no counting pixels, no recognition across page views or visits. There is a plain tally of page views, described under point 4, which records nothing about anybody.
- No external content. No fonts, maps, videos or scripts from other servers. Everything your browser loads comes from this server. Your IP address is therefore passed to nobody.
- No advertising, no profiling, no automated decision-making within the meaning of Article 22 GDPR.
- No disclosure to third parties. Nothing is sold, traded or used for anyone else's advertising. Your messages are not passed on either: they are handled on the same server they arrive at, with no AI system and no filtering service involved. The only service provider in the picture is the one running the server — see point 8.
3. Server logs
Retrieving a page produces log data for technical reasons: time, address requested, volume of data transferred and status code. The IP address is truncated before being written — for IPv4 the last block is dropped, for IPv6 everything from the fourth onwards. Attribution to an individual person is therefore no longer possible. Browser and operating system identifiers are not logged.
Purpose: operation, security and fault diagnosis.
Legal basis: Article 6(1)(f) GDPR — legitimate interest in trouble-free
and secure operation.
Retention: at most 14 days, then automatic deletion.
This data is not combined with other sources and is not used to identify individuals.
4. Counting page views
We would like to know whether this site is found at all — by search engines and by people. There is a tally for that, deliberately recording so little that it cannot contain any information about a person.
When a page is requested, the program identifier sent by the browser is read and assigned to one of four groups: Google, Bing, other automated retrieval, or "no bot identifier". All that is stored is one tick per day and group — for instance "14 August, no bot identifier, 3". The identifier itself is discarded after the assignment and never written down.
Not stored: IP address (not truncated and not hashed either), which page was requested, where the visitor came from, or any time more precise than the calendar day. There are no cookies, no session and no record of an individual visit. Two visits by the same person are indistinguishable from two visits by different people.
Legal basis: Article 6(1)(f) GDPR — legitimate interest in being able
to judge whether our own site is visible.
Retention: indefinite. A daily count with no personal reference does
not need deleting; after any length of time it still cannot be attributed to anybody.
5. Getting in touch
If you write to us through the contact form or by email, we process the details you provide: your email address, optionally your name, and the content of your message.
Purpose: handling and answering your enquiry.
Legal basis: Article 6(1)(f) GDPR — legitimate interest in answering
enquiries addressed to us. We do not ask for consent: somebody who writes to us wants
an answer, and that needs no further declaration.
Retention: until the enquiry has been dealt with conclusively, then at
most six months for follow-up questions. After that the message is deleted. Messages
identified as spam are deleted immediately.
Giving your name is voluntary. We need the email address in order to reply — without it the enquiry cannot be handled. The IP address is not stored when the form is submitted.
6. How incoming mail is handled
An email address that has to appear in the legal notice attracts unwanted mail. Two measures work against that, both on our own server:
- Delay. Unknown senders are temporarily refused on their first delivery attempt. Proper mail servers try again; many bulk senders do not.
- Scoring. Incoming messages are scored by filtering software and, where suspicious, filed into a separate folder rather than refused — for an address that has to be reachable, a wrongly rejected message is the more expensive mistake.
The messages are read by a human. No external service is involved, no filtering provider and no AI system; the content of your message does not leave the server it arrived on.
Legal basis: Article 6(1)(f) GDPR — legitimate interest in warding off unsolicited bulk mail, without which an openly stated mailbox cannot be operated.
One caveat all the same: an email is readable in transit between the servers involved, and while this form is transmitted encrypted, it is not built for confidential material. Please do not send us anything that must not fall into the wrong hands — no credentials, no identity documents, no bank details. For a confidential matter we will set up another route on request.
7. The form's spam protection
The contact form is protected against automated submissions without any external service. No captcha provider, no external filtering service — that would amount to exactly the data sharing this site otherwise avoids.
Instead: an additional field invisible to humans, a check on the time between opening and submitting, a cryptographically signed form marker, and a limit on submissions per sender per hour. For that limit the IP address is stored solely as a hash with a daily changing addition and deleted after five hours at the latest; the address itself is not recorded and cannot be reconstructed from the hash once it has expired.
Legal basis: Article 6(1)(f) GDPR — legitimate interest in a functioning route of contact.
8. Hosting
This site runs on a rented virtual server from Alfahosting GmbH, Edmund-von-Lippmann-Straße 13–15, 06112 Halle (Saale), Germany, in a data centre in Germany. A data processing agreement under Article 28 GDPR is in place with the provider.
The provider in turn uses subprocessors and keeps the current list available. With two exceptions they are located in the European Union: a supplier of TLS certificates in the United Kingdom, and a group company in Switzerland providing internal systems and user support. The European Commission has found both countries to offer an adequate level of data protection, so transfers there require no additional safeguards. Neither service is used for this site — the TLS certificates come from Let's Encrypt and are managed on the server itself.
9. Your rights
You have the right at any time to
- access the data stored about you (Article 15 GDPR),
- rectification of inaccurate data (Article 16 GDPR),
- erasure (Article 17 GDPR),
- restriction of processing (Article 18 GDPR),
- data portability (Article 20 GDPR),
- object to processing based on legitimate interests (Article 21 GDPR).
No processing here currently rests on consent, so there is nothing to withdraw. For everything else an informal message to kontakt@mailv1.com is enough.
You also have the right to complain to a supervisory authority. The competent authority here is the State Commissioner for Data Protection and Freedom of Information of Baden-Württemberg, Lautenschlagerstraße 20, 70173 Stuttgart, Germany.
10. Changes
This policy applies in the version published here. If something changes about what happens on this site, it will be amended.
As at 16 August 2026