Public Service Announcement

There's an advert out and about at the moment encouraging you to switch your e-mail wossnames over to Microsoft, because Outlook - unlike those corporate monsters at Google/Gmail - won't go through your correspondence and milk every second word for targeted marketing data.

I'm on Outlook [herefore known by the entire world as 'Hotmail', but whatever], and a little over half an hour ago I sent a mail to a friend in South Africa discussing my holiday plans for Christmas in Sri Lanka and his mother's well-being in Cape Town. I now have an e-mail - in my Junk folder, admittedly/amusingly - from an unknown South African travel agent, urgently inviting me to experience the wondrousness of Cape Town this December.

From which we learn:

1) that Outlook almost certainly are reading your e-mails; but
2) they're just not very good at it - otherwise they'd have noticed:

• that I've already booked my Christmas holiday,
• that I will clearly not be spending the festive season in South Africa, and
• that the bulk of our correspondence was taken up with the fact that Denis's mum's place in Cape Town has recently been violently burgled.