I read recently that Egham in Surrey is the email “spam” capital of Great Britain with each individual receiving (on average) 189 junk emails a day. The article doesn’t really offer any reasons why poor Egham holds this dubious honour, however it does say that by contrast Fareham in Hampshire  is a little more fortunate with business users only receiving (on average) only two pieces of junk mail.

Over the past few years I have noticed that the amount of spam has been steadily increasing in my inbox. This includes the obvious “viagra” and “cialis” stuff which in itself (as long as you don’t open any attachments or click on any links) is pretty harmless, but also the amount of other “junk” has also been increasing. This includes emails pretending to be my bank, emails sent under the guise of “subscribed” newsletters with no noticeable means of “unsubscribing” and lastly (but not least) emails I term “urban legend” mailings. These emails are generally sent by friends who are taken in by a request to pass on a shoking story to their entire address book in order to inform people as a kind of public service.

To this effect I have started to use an email “pre-filtering” service called Bopspam. Bopspam collects your email from your server, performs some filtering of your email messages keeping those it considers spam and then allowing you to download the genuine messages to your inbox. Although there is a certain amount of set-up and learning to get this working, I have to say that it is pretty good. All emails classified as “junk” are retained until deleted from their server by you and mail which is wrongly identified can be re-classified by you via a simple user interface.

Give it a go. In the words of Del Boy…”You know it makes sense”.

When I was a teenager I spent three weeks of my final year in secondary school at a work placement in a local printing company. Don’t ask me why I ended up there. I had never expressed an interest in the finer points of printing in any of the chats with the careers officer but perhaps (on reflection) she probably thought the printing company was my town’s closest answer to Microsoft (where I actually wanted to spent my time!!) … it was a fairly large company I suppose.

Anyway, the three weeks spent setting up large machines, cleaning large machines, watching large machines and sweeping up after large machines didn’t really make me a printing fan. Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t harbour any major deep-rooted (lie down on the couch and tell me about it) hatred for the process either, I just regarded it as a process. And quite a boring one at that.

Recently however, I have started using moo.com. Moo is a new kind of printing company which tries to inject a slice of creativity and fun into the whole printing process. Moo.com allows ordinary people (like you and me) to get creative with printing on a relatively small and inexpensive scale. What makes moo.com special is that it Integrates with a lot of the current social networking sites such as Facebook and Flickr, making it really easy to get your creative efforts into print.

Since discovering moo.com, I have found myself trying to find new ways to use the service they provide. Their packaging is superb and they are moving in the right environmentally-friendly direction. Why not give them a go. Printing has just got funky!