In my attempt to promote and use local companies this year I want to briefly mention PHI Networks. This local company based up the road from me in Headley, Hampshire installs computer cabling for other small local companies and organisations. Now I know, if I start talking to you about computer cabling and Cat5E you are probably going to switch off, but hear me out. PHI Networks, owned and managed by Patrick Hemus are the kind of company which doesn’t just pay lip service to the words “Customer Service” but actively seeks to put their customers first throughout the whole business process. A couple of weeks ago, I contacted them about a client of mine who had a very small cabling job that needed doing. Almost immediately they were contacted by Patrick, an appointment was booked and within 3 days the job was done and dusted to a very high quality and at a very reasonable price. All the way through the process not only was the client kept informed but also PHI Networks kept me (as the person who had referred them) informed. This kind of attention to detail is the reason I will be using them again. So, if you know of anyone who needs any computer cabling, give Patrick a call.

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”.