Email swamped with pathetic invites from random strangers

THIS is the latest in our occasional series on How the Internet Works. Part 94: Podcasting For Pleasure and Profit.

- Phil Wisdom

The Mid-Pacific Gyre is an area in, as the name implies, the middle of the Pacific where that ocean’s restless vortices ceaselessly churn much of the world’s floating rubbish into a roughly circular anthropogenic sub-continent of crud, popularly known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. What's not popularly known is that it has an equivalent in the virtual world: a single email address which, for some reason now long lost in the miasma of corporate amnesia, aggregates correspondence for all our various publications, both newspapers and the CornwallLive/DevonLive websites. Within it, castaway fragments of valuable information, such as notifications of community events or letters to the editor, bob forlornly amid a vast floating carpet of toxic detritus with titles such as “Final Reminder - Only 15 Days Left to Vote for the 2024 Polymer Producers Awards!” and “Ex-royal cleaner’s unusual cleaning tool might already be in your kid’s toy box”.