I had an email from Richard Branson today. No, really. Well, not quite. It was a marketing email from Virgin Media telling me all about the company's new online storage and back up service, V Stuff.

I was impressed. It offers 5GB of storage and backup and a number of free photo prints. As I recently decided to get more organised in backing up our huge number of photos of Owen, V Stuff seemed ideal -and so much cheaper than Apple's MobileMe.

But I had a shock when I went to register. It insisted on an email address. Simple, I thought, I'll use my normal Virgin one. Oops: the website said that as I had already registered this email address with the photo service Snapfish, I couldn't use it for V Stuff, which uses Snapfish for its prints. How stupid is that?