I regularly get spam from all sorts of unsavoury places - well, we all know what it contains. But I’m also getting regular spam from a number of organisations which look like they could be legitimate businesses. One is from the most cr*p hotel I ever stayed in. I would sooner spend the night inside a suitcase in the left luggage department Kings Cross station than stay there again.

I wonder how effective e-government is so I emailed the DTi - eventually (although they did apologise for the delay) they sent me a long convulating response about how the UK, USA, Australia, United Nations, Pan Gallatic Federation etc etc were doing everything in their power but spam is a ‘global problem’ and it is not going to be easy to stop it. (cf with action being taken against people who share music).

They also suggested I contacted the Information Commissioner which I did, who responded within a day. So far so good. But they have suggested I download a form ( the first part doesn’t display properly, but then I use Firefox so perhaps they never tested it for cross browser compatability). I then need to fill in the form and post it “back to us at the address at the bottom of the form”.

Not very joined up is it? But having struggled with the baroque information architecture of the ODPM website, the fact that Directgov doesn’t work properly in Mozilla and a host of other small but irritating glitches it comes as no surprise.

A lot of these issues would not be hard to resolve - just a little attention to detail, some wider testing and perhaps a bit of user intervention or testing?