Edelman's (Microsoft's PR Agency) posh offices in Victoria Street provided the venue for judging short-listed entries for the Microsoft Innovate 08 Awards. Other judges were from the IDeA (Improvement & Development Agency) LGC (Local Government Chronicle) and, of course, Microsoft. Finalists will be announced next week.


Since Newham failed to send a bounce message to Helen Olsen in response to a misaddressed e-mail, we have been corresponding about whether this will constitute a cause for creating avoidable contact under the new National Indicator 14. I am now convinced that it will. Newham's justification for not sending bounce messages to misaddressed external e-mails is, I am told, because a basic spamming technique is to send lots of emails in an organisation and the ones that are not rejected would be valid email addresses; those recipients would then get even more spam. Well that may be the case, but I guess that would mean we were organising our systems for our own convenience, rather than that of our own customers, so we should now change our policy. Yet again, however, this raises the question of why our industry has not yet adopted IPv6, in which all e-mail should be traceable back to source.