This is a job for the voice squad

One of the reasons summer is so pleasurable is that the volume of phone calls and voicemails drops dramatically. All those people who spend the rest of the year nagging you to within an inch of your sanity decamp to DisneyWorld and Ibiza to recharge their batteries, so they can return and spend another 50 weeks emailing you with pointless demands.

From: compulsive.emailer

To: Tim

Subject: I'm back from DisneyWorld

I'm back! Please let me have the plans Tuesday, although Monday would be good, unless they are delayed, in which case the schedule by Tuesday and the plans Wednesday am. If the schedule is early, then ... and so on.

If you miss the enhanced level of communication email provides, I've just lucked on to an excellent service called Announce, born and raised in Chiswick, west London. Much as I hate to encourage this type of behaviour, Announce is a simple and efficient way to get your email on the bus. Or on the beach in Ibiza.

The idea is that you're out of the office and you don't want to take your hulking laptop. So you set rules on your company email server to divert all your messages or even selected messages (you set the rule) to the Announce server, then on to your mobile phone using SMS. For those of you who skipped that chapter in your phone manual, SMS is like a pager - it sends messages 160 characters long to your phone. For those of you who skipped every chapter in the manual, your phone is the little black thing on your desk that makes a trilling sound 10 times a day.

Now, if you're like me, your incoming mail messages are a little in excess of 160 characters long. After all, that's only enough to say: WHERE ARE YOU BEEN LOOKING FOR YOU WHAT'S ALL THIS ON THE EXPENSES FORM ABOUT ESCORT SERVICES FOUR HUNDRED POUNDS IF I FIND OUT THAT YOU WERE IN A BAR INSTEAD OF THE SEMINAR ON ROUTER MANAGEMENT I WI ...

Announce will either chop the messages, or give just the title or sender.

Whatever. You then call Announce from your phone and an automated voice reads you your mail, while you fantasise that Stephen Hawking is your PA. Otherwise, you can tell it to send the messages to the nearest fax machine.

And that's it. You pay a fee per message, depending on where you are in the world, and you don't have to mess around with a notebook or hybrid mobile phone Web browser. I would use the service, but I'm far too busy avoiding my email so it would be wasted on me. However, I recommend you adopt it, not least because I've been spending the last month emailing all of you and no one has got back to me. Why? Because you're all on holiday and you didn't take your laptop computers because you needed the space for suntan lotion. Well, don't say I didn't warn you - and I still need that report by Wednesday am.

Tim Phillips is a freelance journalist.