I certainly would like to see Microsoft help out in the war against spam, but not by attempting to reinvent the wheel again. Rather than starting from scratch, why not lend your corporate/technical muscle to existing projects such as SpamAssassin, and make it easier to link that into Exchange Server, OE, Outlook, etc. Innovations that you provide could then be fed back into the wider community (hey, not everyone uses MS products to send/receive spam!) thus reducing spam for everyone. It might even serve as an olive branch to the Opensource community, which would be no bad thing.

MS would do well to avoid the whole "not written here" mindset in areas such as this where interoperability is so much more important (surely) than market share? I would have thought that the kerberos issue would have proven that (the sort-of implementation of an industry standard). Or is this still really about money at the end of the day rather than a concerted willingness to end spam?

With sincere apologies to the Python boys. ;>

"Amongst our weaponry are such diverse elements as: fear, surprise, ruthless efficiency, an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope, and nice red uniforms - Oh damn!"

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