The difficulties of keeping an accurate international conference database have been brought home to Obiter recently as one lawyer tells of the deluge of e-mails she has received after not attending the International Bar Association get-together in Auckland at the end of last October. While our correspondent was scheduled to speak at the event, she unfortunately had to drop out a month in advance owing to the pressures of work back in London. Nonetheless, that has not stopped a stream of international lawyers from contacting her in the following two months to say how much they enjoyed meeting her in New Zealand. One of the e-mails can be dismissed as a thinly-veiled scam letter sent in an attempt to obtain her law firm's bank account details. But others are more entertaining. For example, the friendly note from last year's IBA president Emilio Cárdenas thanking her for her 'kind co-operation' in Auckland. Lawyers are persistent critics of junk or misguided e-mail, so it looks as though the IBA needs to buck up its ideas, or at least its conference attendance monitoring.