From this morning's trawl of the spam-trap generic work email inbox.

On the 1st of november , we will have to pay for the use of our MSN and email accounts unless we send this message to at least 18 contacts on your contact list. It's no joke if you don't believe me then go to the site ( www.msn.com ) and see for yourself. Anyways once you've sent this message to at least 18 contacts , your msn dude will become blue. please copy and paste don't forward cos people won't take notice of it otherwise!

Also, the word gullible isn't in the dictionary.

Sun Microsystems is an interesting company. They've done a lot for open source stuff with their cash behind both Java and OpenOffice. On the other hand they tried to persuade the world that “the network is the computer” and everyone should buy expensive Sun servers to power “cheap” thin clients. They also came up with Network the Dog, who seems to have all but been erased from the Internets these days - I guess he's one dog who was just for Christmas.

I cut my *nix teeth admining a Solaris box though, so I had some fond memories - until today.

As a few people know, I work for a small online games company you've never heard of. We do online sports management sims based on the lower, amateur side of sports. The oldest game we have is Sunday League which has been around since mid-2000 and takes its impetus from Sunday League Football wherein a number of variously talented lads with degrees of fitness attempt to injure each other on the field of battle play before getting lathered in the pub.

Long before I arrived Cat Games decided to trademark Sunday League. This is, sadly, a long, involved process which is one of many ways for lawyers to squeeze money out of you. It gets even worse when a big company like Sun decides to take a pop at you. A care package came back from the lawyers today - Sun is apparently blocking our trademark on the basis that people might get confused; that they would think Sun were involved in Sunday League. That, to be more specific, when people heard “Sunday League” they might think of a “league” or range of “Sun Ray” or “Sun Blade” products and, I don't know, sign up for our game instead of buying an over-priced web server.

We just think they're bat-shit insane.

Some people put too much into their feedback...

(and he also spelt “off” incorrectly)