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.

The Microsoft doctors break the news to a 5-year-old

Your internet connection went away, but we'll keep trying until we get it back!