No to 'Outbound telesales'

At home, we seem to suffering a new spate of unsolicited sales calls - spam telephony, if you like (or don't). Even though both of the numbers are registered with the Telephone Preference Service (http://www.tpsonline.org.uk), the companies that are doing this just don't care. They're calling on what are clearly long distance circuits, with pre-dialling (sometimes several seconds delay after you answer before a human voice comes on the phone), and connect you to someone with a distinctly non-British accent, who doesn't know who they're really trying to contact.

This can be dangerous. Even when the caller identifies the name of the company she or he represents, there's no way to know whether or not this is for real. Someone called me today, she said, on behalf of a company whose services I've used for years. But she got the number of years wrong, and that says to me that she was doing the telephone equivalent of phishing.

I don't want to give any details to an unknown caller to enable them to offer me 'advice'. Nor do I do want to invite a high-pressure salesman into my home just because they happen to have 'someone in the area' next week; what area, planet Earth?

Telephone companies are bothersome at best when they phone to try and sell something. When they ask you at the end of a 20 minute call, "by the way, the contract is for 18 months, is that all right?", that doesn't feel like trustworthy practice. When you say, "I'd like to see the offer in writing", and they say it's only available today over the phone, is that a strong reason buy anyway? And if they send the key details, and they're in grey 4-point on the back of the brochure, is someone trying to hide something?

Frankly, I can find the products I want using Google, a newspaper, or even a flyer through the post. And then visit the website or make the call to Inbound Telesales, knowing who I'm calling, to do the deal. That's exactly what I did regarding buildings and contents insurance recently. Outbound Telesales is only for things you don't really want. Be brave - don't tick the box allowing them to contact you.

Idea: don't tax deposits or transactions, tax risk

While the Obama proposals to limit banking activities and the resulting restructuring of the banking industry are great news for management consultants and IT specialists like me, I can't help feeling that there's a simpler way to crack this one. Ideas like a Tobin tax, locally or internationally, could mess up trade and financial flows.

Levies based on the size of an institution's deposits, such as the HM Treasury's UK Deposit Protection Scheme, are plainly unfair. This scheme penalises the good rather than deterring the bad. Building societies and retail-focused banks have a large depositor base - and funding operations with a large depositor base is a lower risk affair than relying on wholesale funding as Northern Rock did. Building societies lend against physical assets which in theory should represent properly-valued collateral, which is a whole lot less risky than risking your capital in financial operations.

Banks have spent billions over the last five or six years on technology to calculate and assess risk. It's called Basel II. It has holes that the scruffier end of the market could climb through, but so does any set of rules. Despite that, some banks are really quite good at assessing risk, others less so.

Instead of taxing deposits or transactions, we should tax risk. This can be done at different rates depending on the type and the term of the risk, it would be priced into transactions and deter the sillier types of trade, and it would give a huge incentive both to the institutions and to the tax men to assess the risks properly to avoid underpaid or overpaid tax.

That's my opinion. Comment welcome.

Random sender addresses

I'm getting really fed up with the practice that some companies have adopted, of setting a new sender address for every e-mail newsletter.

For example, IThound, an Incisive Media publication, sent something with the sender address

mail.ctjkgqetqgbvegquskn@incisive-media.msgfocus.com

This is presumably so that they can route any replies to the originator of the offer that the newsletter covers.

That's not a trusted address so the message is marked as [Spam] and placed in the Junk Mail folder. If I click 'Mark As Wanted' in the AVG toolbar, the message is moved back to the Inbox but no Outlook rules are applied to it. I have to file it manually. A new entry is added to the AVG whitelist, and any further messages from the same sender should be filed according to my Outlook rules settings. In all likelihood, there won't be any further messages with the same random sender address, so all that happens is that my whitelist is stuffed with rubbish like this.

Streetcards, one of my occasional suppliers, who have great products, change the domain name on their outgoing e-mails and the same thing happens.

I actually want to read some of the material that I'm sent. That's why I signed up in the first place. I don't want to unsubscribe, but I don't want to have to waste time either. Hang your heads in shame:

• Incisive Media
• Novatech
• Internet World
• Insurance Times
• Euromoney plc
• Streetcards