Technical questions and answers

After a successful placement, the au pair and the host family can register with their data and we will activate them for our services and offers.
This gives both sides access to other useful areas and information for the au pair stay in Germany.

Access problems often occur due to overly restrictive cookie or script settings.
Relax the restrictions for cookies or scripts in your browser settings.
In order to be able to move within a password-encrypted area, it is necessary that the subsequent page you want to access recognizes you as the user who has authorized access to this page.

This is usually done using cookies that identify you as an authorized user.
Scripts control the identification function of your browser.
Figuratively speaking, the script enables the browser to identify itself as authorized with its cookie, like with a key.

Your login information is stored in encrypted form in a secure database. This means that no one, even with access to the database, can read the passwords in plain text.

In such a case, please inform us or your agent immediately! – preferably via AuPair-HELP.

Unfortunately, attempts at identity theft do not stop at au pairs or host families. An au pair relationship touches on visa and residence rights to a certain extent, which criminal elements are also interested in.

In your own interest, you should handle your passwords with the utmost care.
None of our agents will ask you for your password by phone or email, even if they claim to have something urgently to send you.
Our agents' authorization level is sufficient to send messages or documents to their au pairs or host families.

If a password reset is necessary, you will be prompted by the system itself, not by a separate email.

The providers of mass email accounts are increasingly using automatic spam detection on their servers.
This is done using a variety of mindless algorithms that are allowed to decide, but are rarely checked for their suitability and value for the user.
Email programs such as Thunderbird sort out spam anyway. And this without the presumptuous censorship of an email provider.

The reasons for this are primarily to keep their own server load low by avoiding millions of emails of junk, and less for the benefit of the user, as is often sold to them. However, these providers like to downplay the fact that this forces patronizing and even censorship on the users of email accounts. The providers mentioned above have often attracted unpleasant attention in the past, particularly when it comes to receiving emails.

The user believes that he can communicate with the world without restrictions and thousands of them become willing victims of dependence on gmail & Co. every day.
The mechanisms used are comparable to a little goblin who sits in the post office and can decide which letters the recipient can and cannot receive based on the sender, the color and shape of the envelope or the way the stamp was stuck on.

Read the terms of use of these providers carefully and react immediately to irregularities that are reported to you by people in your personal environment. ("Hey, I sent an email last week. Didn't you get it?")

If you hear something like this, be on high alert.

If your "mail provider" cannot help you satisfactorily with this problem, the only answer is: "Adios!!"
For a company that relies on an email address from such a provider, this is not only embarrassing, it is also tantamount to business suicide.

Imagine that an email provider decides whether to deliver an email with a lucrative order for the company or to reject it as supposed spam. Or the applicant who waits in vain for a job offer or a confirmation link to be sent to him.

In Europe, this is actually unthinkable!
It is to be hoped that supervisory and regulatory authorities will intervene and soon put a stop to these machinations.

You've probably heard of "sealing letters" before.

Or how would you react if you received a personal letter that had already been opened and perhaps read by strangers?

If that were the only issue, there would probably be nothing to see.

But that is not the issue.

It is about the fact that it is everyone's right to communicate privately with other people without third parties gaining knowledge of the content of this communication.

For more than two decades, this right has been trampled on by secret services and thus responsible governments of various states.

In Europe, this is called data retention.

In a manner that is almost reminiscent of a schizoid personality disorder, the citizens of a state are robbed of their privacy by spying on them, reading their emails, listening to their phone calls and monitoring their internet traffic.

Innocent citizens are assumed to have criminal intentions per se and, contrary to all constitutional principles, which also include the presumption of innocence, the private sphere is violated with such intolerable draft laws. undermined.

At the corporate level, this is done by foreign states for the purpose of industrial espionage in order to gain economic advantages.

The fairy tale of the so-called fight against terrorism has become so hackneyed that only the dullest of people would fall for it. Even the largest governments have now turned out to be, at best, the rogue states that they always refer to as "The Others".

Users of Thunderbird as an email program do not need any other programs or add-ons. The necessary settings can be made and your own keys generated under the menu item "End-to-end encryption" in the account overview.
Mozilla offers further information on this at: https://support.mozilla.org/de/kb/einfuhrung-in-thunderbirds-e2ee-verschlusselung

A suitable key management program such as Kleopatra should already be installed on the computer.

On mobile devices, the K9-Mail apps in conjunction with OpenKeychain offer optimal protection.

Cross-platform programs and apps can be found at. https://www.openpgp.org