There’s really no incentive, now that Netscape has long since been beaten into the ground, for Microsoft to see off anyone in what one could call the “traditional” internet sector – e-mail, browsing, FTP That war is over. The fights are being fought over new areas, on which Microsoft is focusing heavily. But e-mail isn’t one of them, and so you shouldn’t expect any dramatic – or even slight – improvements to Outlook Express in the future.Microsoft doesn’t have any reason to improve it. The point is, as The Register site noted, that Microsoft has built Windows around the browsing experience of Internet Explorer, not the e-mail experience of Outlook Express. Instead, what the source at Microsoft’s “information worker product management group” said was “Microsoft will continue its innovation around the e-mail experience in Windows”.Interesting word, that – “around” Note that it was not “of”.

Two weeks ago a story appeared on ZDNet Australia saying that Microsoft had decided to kill off OE That was quickly denied – or not exactly denied. “Other mail application vendors were forced to mimic that behaviour for the sake of compatibility with Microsoft mail clients… Hence, when you click on a virus-infected attachment, Windows runs it, and you get infected.”Microsoft mail readers have for many years ignored the warnings and implemented almost exactly the behaviour that was recommended against,” Moore noted on Dave Farber’s “Interesting People” mailing list Worse, the first versions let almost anything run. The problem: although the recommendations for the way mail programs receive attachments over the net said that “severe security problems could result” from allowing the mail program to run programs (which is what happens when you double-click on an attachment), Microsoft ignored the advice. But as Keith Moore from the University of Tennessee’s computing department noted, a lot of today’s troubles stem from the decisions that Microsoft made in designing OE (as it’s usually known) and its successors.

Others suggested that the fault lay closer to computer users: with Outlook Express, the most commonly-used e-mail client, and Microsoft’s early design decisions with it.There are certainly hundreds of millions of copies of Outlook Express in use today; the program first appeared in the Nineties. Now it just doesn’t work.”While he went and searched for alternatives, the search for a culprit began. Some concentrated on the writer of the SoBig virus, believed to be a skilled programmer paid by American spammers, who want to create a network of machines that they can control to send yet more spam The trouble is that the writer remains elusive. The situation, he wrote, has finally become “completely intolerable Before this it was a total mess. Normally I get 10 real e-mails a day – plus about 200 or 300 spams.”With the blizzard of viruses and worms in the past two weeks, allied to the growing volume of spam (estimated by Steve Linford of the anti-spam outfit Spamhaus to now make up 60 per cent of all e-mail), perhaps it is time to take e-mail’s pulse, and ask: “Is e-mail dead?”Certainly, for people such as Winer (who watched the number of messages in his inbox mount from 650 to 2,000 to forget about it in the course of a few hours) the answer was definitely in the affirmative. “Is e-mail broken?” That was the intriguing question, tinged with a little woe, posed by the well-known blogger and software author Dave Winer at his weblog at scripting last week.

For those struggling to cope with hundreds or even thousands of e-mails that were sent either by the SoBig-F virus, or sent wrongly to them by automated virus detection systems (because SoBig fakes the “From:” of its e-mails), the answer probably felt like “yes”.
Matt Sergeant, a senior technologist at the mail-filtering company MessageLabs, said: “On my home e-mail I’ve got some good antivirus filters but even so I had more than 1,000 notification e-mails from postmasters wrongly saying I’d sent them the SoBig virus. That already prices in some recovery but, as ABN Amro points out, the shares have lagged media peers such as Informa and United Business Media A speculative buy.. The shares jumped 11.5p to 173.5p yesterday and, assuming full-year profits of £4.7m, they trade on a forward p/e of 19. For example, revenues at the flagship Bermuda Hedge Fund conference in September will be down £0.5m due to lower sponsorship.Market conditions remain challenging, the company says, but this could be about to change. For example Metal Bulletin used to be a twice-weekly paper publication. Now it has a daily e-mail service with a paper product once a week. The business is investing more in subscriber marketing to ensure sales are supported.