Here’s wishing all our uber-readers a happy, prosperous and peaceful 2006.

Syntagma Media is grateful for your patronage in the short time we’ve been around, and look forward to your company in the New Year.

Those little teams of developers at the Googleplex working on anything they please have come up with another spiffing wheeze: autoresponders in Gmail.

If, like me, you can never be bothered setting up the autoresponders at your Web host, this is a good alternative. Simple and (we hope) effective. Like everything else Googlish, it’s free.

To find out how to get started, go to How do I set up an automatic vacation response?

Typically, they don’t even call them autoresponders, which would put a lot of people off.

Just clicked on the spam button in Gmail to check my correspondence from China, when what do I see? A “Web Clip” nestling at the top of the page for “Spam Hashbrown Bake”.

Out of curiosity, I clicked on the link and arrived at a recipe site giving detailed instructions for the said (sad) dish.

Could this be construed as Spam on Spam?

Coming Up: A review of John Battelle’s new book on Google, “The Search”. Don’t miss.