The three-year contract, worth more than 100m, will supply the Co-op with 100% renewable-produced .

The company claims it will provide power to 4,500 Co-op outlets the UK.

The deal comes after the two companies joined together to build a wind farm in Cambridgeshire, which opened earlier this year.

Scottish Power, the UK’s biggest generator and developer of wind energy, claims the deal is one of the biggest of its kind.

The agreement builds on a similar, newly-expired deal and the 17m joint venture to build the wind farm which can supply 10,000 homes.

The power will be supplied to Co-op’s shops, funeral parlours, , travel agencies and CIS Co-operative Insurance outlets.

Willie MacDiarmid, Scottish Power’s energy retail director, said: “This green energy deal strengthens our relationship with the Co-operative Group and reinforces the commitment of both to responsible business and the environment.”

But the good news is that although more junk mail will be sent, those that take steps to protect themselves are going to get a lot less of it landing in their inbox.

The reason that less spam will reach users, he believes, is because the computer industry has finally started working together to tackle the problem.

“One company alone cannot solve this,” he said.

Industrial action

One of the first results of this is the decision to unite formerly competing proposals to stop spam.

Microsoft, along with Amazon and anti-spam firm Brightmail, had backed an idea dubbed Caller-ID for e-mail.

This involved checking whether e-mail arrived from where it said it did. It was intended to combat spam that spoofs its originating address.

TYPES OF SPAM Dubious products - 9% Graphical porn - 7.5% Other spam - 7.5% Newsletters - 6% Scams - 7% Travel/gambling/games - 3% Financial - 13% Herbal/drugs/vitamins - 10% Insurance - 4% Non-graphic porn - 33%

The competing proposal was called the Sender Policy Framework, which was backed by AOL, Yahoo, BT and others, also tried to spot forged addresses.

Now the two have been brought together into one proposal called Sender ID.

“We are right now finishing up converging the specifications and that will be submitted to the Internet Engineering Task Force once it is complete,” said Mr Webb.

The IETF has the job of improving and changing the net’s core architecture.

The alliance is significant because of Microsoft’s former dogged insistence on championing its own technology at the expense of others.

“We need to take action as an industry because before now there’s been a lot of talk,” said Mr Webb told BBC News Online. “Once you get consensus you want it rapidly adopted.”

Microsoft is also looking at ways to separate spam from legitimate marketing e-mail that people are happy to receive.

Mr Webb said Microsoft is also behind the idea of “bonded senders” which involves bulk mail firms lodging a cash sum as a guarantee that their e-mail is legitimate.

Charges are made against the bond if complaints are made about e-mail a company is sending.

Mr Webb said cash bonds and other reputation servers will help filtering systems sort the good from bad e-mail.

“That’s one of the key of the model at the moment,” said Mr Webb, “filtering just treats every e-mail equally and that’s a problem that needs to be solved.”

Technical tricks

For people who send only a few e-mail messages per day Microsoft is also working on a way to force sending machines to carry out a short computational task every time they despatch a message.

Spam is stopping people using e-mail

The task, which would take about 30 seconds to perform, would only inconvenience those sending thousands of messages from a desktop PC.

“It’s a pretty elegant idea and we are working on ways now to put this in products,” said Mr Webb.

Microsoft is also putting anti-spam filters in its Outlook e-mail program, Exchange e-mail server system and software for the MSN web service.

But, said Mr Webb, technology alone would not stop spam.

Microsoft had 14 lawyers filing lawsuits against spammers and currently, said Mr Webb, it had 90 cases under way and more would follow.

Net service firms also had to take action against PCs on their networks that have been compromised and are acting as spam-spewing relays.

He said that governments also had to frame laws to outlaw e-mail and more had to be done to educate users about spam and what they can do to tackle it.

“People say that they were using e-mail less because of spam and they are extremely annoyed by it,” said Mr Webb.

But, he added, users do have to bear some of the blame.

“They have also bought more spam-related goods than you would think,” he said.

Mr Webb said that only progress on a lot of fronts will make spammers stop.

“The problem is this is a good business to be in today,” he said “that’s the core challenge we face.”

One in four credit card holders were charged for exceeding their limit or missing a payment over the last year, according to a Which? magazine survey.

The consumer magazine said some firms sent statements out late and used second class post, giving customers less time to pay.

It said the charges, usually between 20 and 25, were out of to the costs incurred by the companies.

The industry dismissed the criticisms as out of date.

However, in terms of borrowing, there are still good deals available from a number of credit card companies (see box).

0% on Balance Transfer & New Purchases Halifax - One Visa - after nine months (9.9%) Bank of Scotland - One Visa - after nine months (9.9%) Co-op - Travel Visa - after seven months (14.9%) Source: Moneyfacts

Among other practices highlighted by Which? as costing customers dearly were making minimum so low that customers take longer to repay the money, thereby attracting more in interest.

It said the industry made at least 1bn a year from the sale of payment protection insurance, but said most policies were and gave limited cover.

Other stories in today’s programme

Some you never hear much about in the media, others are heavily promoted by household names. The FSA recently fined Axa Sun Life 500,000 for producing misleading advertisements for the sale of two products. Should you be careful if a celebrity is pushing a product? Simon took a look.

UK employees who did unpaid overtime in 2004 would have each earned 4,650 for their efforts if they had received a wage, a new report from the TUC says.

BT customers will have to pay more for early morning calls from 16 February.
About three million BT customers could see their bills rise as it shifts the start of its more costly daytime call rate from 8am to 6am.

Yellow school buses are big in America. Now a company in Newport is trying to make them big over here too. Rob visited the firm.

Families can get discounts of up to 400, free child places and insurance.

They have until 28 March to book for summer 2005 and must present travel agents with a special form from school.

Oxfordshire County Council is taking part in the pilot scheme by the Department for and the Association of British Travel Agents.

Councillor Tony Crabbe, Oxfordshire County Council executive member for schools, said: “It is very disruptive to a pupil’s education to be taken out of school during term time.

“We hope the scheme will help discourage this from happening by meeting the needs of parents who may struggle to take summer holidays at peak time because of the extra costs.”

Tour operators involved include Thomas Cook, Kuoni, Virgin, Airtours, Thomson, Sky Tours and First Choice.