I've had a very high spam count of late, if I may put it that way. I received a "we have taken appropriate action against this account" response from psi.com today, and looked up the original complaint to see how long it had taken to process the issue. I received the spam email in question at 2001-05-12 16:02 +1000, sent the complaint at 2001-05-12 17:41 +1000, received an automated response including a ticket number within one minute of sending the complaint, and received the final notice that action had been taken at 2001-05-17 04:43 +1000. When my spam folder is sorted by date, there are 49 other spam-related messages between the automated response and the final action notice, an interval of four and a half days.

I haven't given up the notion of designing and implementing a new mail protocol that is designed to be rather more hostile to spammers, an idea I mentioned the last time I had email woes. I'm fully aware that the major problem with such a new protocol would not be designing it, but actually getting anyone to use it. Network effects and all that sort of thing.

Speaking of email woes, the viruses haven't been quite so bad of late, but a passing thought on the subject made me realise something about Microsoft. Their favourite word is "innovate" (and its various inflected forms, such as "innovation"), but it is very hard to actually identify something that they've innovated, in a moderately strict sense of that word. They tend to use "innovate" in a general positive reinforcement kind of way: innovation good; Microsoft innovate; Microsoft good. In terms of finding any technology where they've been the pioneers in the field, however, the pickings are slim. They're very good at making other people's innovations ubiquitous by incorporating them into their operating system of the day, but that's not innovation according to my pedant's guide to the English language.

Even so, I've found an area in which they are truly innovative. Not only that, but they have been repeatedly innovative in this manner. I refer to their propensity for making software so featureful that it tends towards a general-purpose programming environment, with all the possibilities that implies. They were, for example, the first company to write a word processor so "powerful" that you could write a virus in its macro scripting language. If you'd told me ten or so years ago that a word processor document file could act as a virus, I'd have called you clueless. Microsoft, however, have blazed a trail such that Word ".doc" files should be basically treated as binary executables, albeit for a virtual machine called Microsoft Word.

But that's not the last of it. As recently as five years ago I'd have called you clueless if you tried to tell me that simply viewing or receiving an email could inflict a virus on your system. Again, through profound innovation, Microsoft has overcome this barrier. Thanks to a combination of preview panes and scripting language support, Microsoft have made it possible for the humble email to act as an executable that anyone can send to you and potentially run without manual intervention on your part. Now that's innovative!

It's true that there are some limits to this system, but people find new ways to work around those limits on an almost daily basis. One company was even trying to sell an email tracking service (informing you when someone reads your mail, how long it was open for, and who they forwarded it to) that relied on Microsoft's innovative features for its operation. In today's news, however, people have been finding new and exciting ways of exploiting some of the innovative features in Microsoft's IIS web server.

There's no question that Microsoft is a great innovator, from, as Obi-Wan Kenobi said, a certain point of view.