Our last newsletter discussed information overload and advised on classifying information in 4 categories: Essential, Desirable, Maybe and Junk.  We advised that you give attention in the same descending sequence from Essential Information (immediate attention) to Junk (delete).  You are the judge and you do the classification of emails in your folder on the fly.  For example, which category does this Compucon User Community Newsletter fall into?  We cannot classify it for you but we have done the homework to make sure that this newsletter contains information that is Desirable to our readers and that our readers will gain some value from reading it. 

The Parliament has enacted an act called The Unsolicited Electronic Message Act.  From 5 September 2007, people in New Zealand who are convicted of spamming will be fined up to $200K and companies up to $500K.   Whilst this Act may help reduce spam coming into our PC by 10% (90% of spam comes from overseas), this Act also reminds us to email out carefully. The Act requires that we email only to people who have given us express or inferred consent, that we explain why we send out this email and that we provide an Unsubscribe reminder.  Most importantly the content of the email must not contain rogue information to mislead people into buying something.  Let us know if you wish to understand this topic further for your own applications.