TLDR: just use your phone. Yes people causing interference through improper use of the ham bands do get run down by the FCC some of the time. If you do it at low power on some UHF frequency with very few users, probably no one would notice if you didn’t do it too often, but those frequencies are only good for short range communication anyway, so you might as well use your phone. The low frequencies that can travel international distances are more interesting but they are also more closely observed.

If you are ok with short range you can also use LoRA or meshtastic instead of ham bands. Encryption is perfectly fine there.

Spoiler alert: it will be “send us more money!”. That’s what they always settle on.

Yeah I heard that one before. Another was using a stamp but putting a layer of Elmer’s glue over it, which stopped the cancellation ink from getting on the stamp. The recipient would wash off the glue and re-use the stamp (covering it with more glue the same way) to write back to you. I never tried that myself but I knew people who claimed to have done this in real life, with 1 cent stamps even. Obvs that was from before email and from when out of town (“long distance”) phone calls were quite expensive for the broke nerds I hung with. So they actually wrote to each other with snail mail.

Wishful thinking. Look at Wikipedia. Open everything, total content dumps available as single tarballs, “free the communities” as one of their founding tenets when it started, lots of spammy mirror sites, yet everyone is still stuck there. Main reason is the stupendous search rank makes everyone go there. This is one reason I decided to block search engines from my personal site. It’s ok, no one reads it either way.

Yeah, basically this. You could ask some followup questions about how they feel about the situation, if they haven’t talked your ear off about that already.