[2005] EWHC 3020 (Comm) 21 December 2005. The solicitors for H emailed B inviting it to settle outstanding hire charges. The email address had not been used in any previous communication from B, but appeared in a maritime directory and on B's website. Both H's solicitors and the arbitrator sent several emails to that address; eventually the arbitrator issued a final award and sent it both by email and post to B's offices. The emails had been received by B's cargo booking department; staff there had treated them as unsolicited emails, and therefore ignored them, as they were under the impression that legal correspondence would have used more appropriate channels. B applied to set aside the arbitrator's award, on the grounds (inter alia) that arbitration proceedings had not been properly brought to its attention; service by email was not yet recognised as effective service under the Civil Procedure Rules (CPR), and by analogy the sending of a notice initiating an arbitration to any email address was equally not effective. "Held": the Arbitration Act 1996, s76, did not require, for service by email to be effective, that the email address at which service was purportedly made had been notified as being an address to be used in the context of the relevant dispute. Any means of service was sufficient provided it was a recognised means of communication to effectively deliver the document to the party to whom it was sent at his address. Email should not be regarded as essentially different from communication by post, fax or telex. In this case, the emails had been actually received at an email address that had been held out as being B's only email address, and the fact that they had not reached the appropriate personnel was an internal problem at B, and did not affect the validity of service.