Christmas Party? What Christmas Party?

When asked earlier by my manager if I was attending our IT department's Christmas party I was very surprised as I didn't know anything about it. It seems that everyone else knew about it, and that I was invited, except me. It's dissappointing as I would of loved to have gone, but finding out a few hours before wasn't enough time for me to cancel my other plans for the night and arrange things.

I have a feeling this may be related to the ongoing problems I am having with email at work at present. The past few weeks I've not been receiving some of the email I know I've been sending myself. When I queried our helpdesk, it appears there is a spam filter running on our Exchange server and that must be blocking them. However, it doesn't send bounces, so we don't know for sure. They suggested if it was important I should use a hotmail account.

It's a shame that for important work emails, I should have to use an external free mail service, as our internal system can't cope. It's going to be embarassing having to give our a gibberish hotmail address to people whose email I need to receive.

It's rather like a phone company blocking certain numbers or operators, then telling it's staff to use a competitors service if they want to be sure of receiving important calls.