I've said to my wife more times than she can bear, Scriptwriters should not be allowed to write about technology. Today, I extend that ban to politicians.

Malcolm Turnball floats the idea of the Australian government providing to all citizens an email address, with a mind to using that as the primary method of communication between the government and the electorate - presumably not the other way though, given the kerfuffle when GetUp! provided form email facilities.

Look, it's a nice idea and all. Just not really well thought out at all. Malcolm may not realise it, but computers are kind of expensive and all. When he says

given the ever decreasing cost of broadband internet services, it would make sense for the government to use the internet to keep in contact with Australians.

It suggests to me that the man has never wanted for anything in his life, let alone the cost of a broadband connection in anywhere other than Sydney, Melbourne or Brisbane. Come on, Mal, we can't even get Telstra to roll out reliable telephone service to country Australia (or the Blue Mountains), let alone ADSL.

For a relatively modest cost and over time, starting with the young and e-savvy, the Australian government could offer to provide every Australian with an electric mail box or pigeon hole.

Relatively modest cost, except for the tech support guys you'll need to keep handy to field calls from a userbase of - out of the air figure - 10 million people, a fair chunk of which have trouble remembering their savings account PIN, let alone the stringent password requirements on their Australian Government email address. I mean, you were going to require people use something more serious than 'password' to protect this account that "government, banks, superannuation funds and long lost friends" might use to communicate with a citizen, right?

Because otherwise, is the Government planning to take all responsibility for the identity fraud possible with a trivially determinable username (firstname.surname.dateOfBirth? Please) and passwords protecting accounts that carry all implied authority that comes with being offered by the Government - although on the other hand, no one takes Medicare cards seriously as a form of identification.

ISPs are telling their customers to use gmail/hotmail instead of their POP and IMAP servers; last year Macquarie University told its students to use gmail instead of the hassle, cost and overhead of running a local email server. Geeks are Sexy asks; Could Gmail become a corporate solution?

I used a gmail account for my consultancy last year. I was going to use an account specific to my business name's URL, but really, I couldn't be bothered with the hassle, the overhead, the concern about spam, etc. Plus my gmail account is my name not some fanciful nick like Level70Paladin@gmail.com, it is the much more dull and boring cam.riley at gmail.

Running email servers are a horrendous pain. The only real reason corporate users will keep it inhouse is to control the flow of information, but spam reduction is already outsourced on a per person cost basis. For smaller businesses who have less to protect, and less money or energy to spend on their own solutions, out-souring to a competent freeware system like gmail makes sense.

* For the record, I don't play online games like World of Warcraft and their clones. But even if I did my gmail account would be the same.

The state of New York is sueing tagged.com for deceptive email marketing practices. Basically tagged was asking for people's contact lists from gmail, yahoo mail, hotmail, etc and then spamming the contact list with luring type emails so others would join tagged.

I accidentally gave facebook access to my gmail contact list when I joined that site, an account I have since deleted. I know other social networking sites do unethical spamming with contact lists as well; Yaari is another that has done it.

There is an additional problem with online services. I had a paypal account back in, say 2001, which I deleted because of paypal's shoddy service. I recently bought a shade sail who wanted me to go through paypal. The page to pay said I already had an account for the credit card I was using ... I did not use paypal to buy the shade sail but within a day I got an email from paypal claiming someone had tried to access my account.

As part of our security measures, we regularly screen activity in the PayPal system. During a recent screening, we noticed an issue regarding your account.

We have reason to believe that your account was accessed by a third party. We have limited access to sensitive PayPal account features in case your

account has been accessed by an unauthorized third party. We understand that having limited access can be an inconvenience, but protecting your account is our primary concern.

For your protection, we have limited access to your account until additional security measures can be completed. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

I am pretty sure I deleted that account deliberately. More so, that credit card is recently new. So who knows what is going on.

Email mistake or is it?: "Raise your hand if you just have one email signature that you use on all your emails -- now drop your hand really fast on your head. We all have those fancy email signatures that include our contact info and maybe even a vCard, they definitely say our name and title. These are great for people who don't know you, but when you are corresponding with other people in your office and regular contacts -- your first name will suffice."

I completely disagree with this. I use email like a form of storage so when I need someone's contact information - especially to do with work, not friends - then I just search for an email from them and ring. To me the email archives are a big bin of contact info.

Our company has a brand police thing going with the contact info on an email. So they are the same form, color, font and layout. I think it is a good idea to always put the name, position, company, phone number, address and email on these. The email is redundant but is good for visualization in my opinion.

The really useless part of contact info is when companies put that 50 sentence disclaimer on the bottom of the email saying you can't copy, paste, read, look at, or do anything with the email unless you get permission from the company the person works for. Those are a waste of time and a waste of bytes being sent across the internet.