A cipher with a little twist

Question

I'm unsure how hard this cipher text will be for experienced solvers. Possibly very easy. Maybe you'll at least spot what I did to try to make it a bit harder.

So my questions are:

1. What does it say?
2. Is there anything special about this message? Perhaps two things?

Eyy pa ml atpn Ypfdpf bklr opm e amyakyykfi rpykdeo, efd neo opm akfd ypedl pa ippd appd el opm tpen etpmfd Kfdke. Pt dkd opm leo Ltk Yefse? Lptto. No lpf Netkml kl leokfi opm bkyy utkfi ml uews e trkfp... Cpllkuyo skfde bklramy! K en pfyo rpckfi apt e wetd leokfi rk.

Answer 1

The cipher text decodes to:

'All of us from London wish you a fulfilling holiday, and may you find loads of good food as you roam around India. Or did you say Sri Lanka? Sorry. My son Marius is saying you will bring us back a rhino... Possibly kinda wishful! I am only hoping for a card saying hi.'

And is encoded with

A simple monoalphabetic substitution cipher. As not all letters of the alphabet are used there are several valid keys, but an example of a suitable one would be:

CIPHER: ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
PLAIN: FWPDANJXGZISUMYOVHKRBECTLQ

The twist is that:

The letters 'E' and 'T' do not appear in the plaintext at all!

These are the 2 most common English letters:



This makes solving a substitution cipher slightly more tricky, although this was still broken with brute force and a bit of correction fairly simply