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I am getting thoroughly depressed with software. Most of it is lumpen, ill-thought out and awkward to use. Much is often impossible to make sense of without a degree in nuclear physics. I tried using Photoshop CS3 yesterday and it was a disaster. I used to know this product moderately well - well enough to fiddle with some digital images and get some basic work done. Today, I am lost at sea.

I have no idea how the toolbars work, or which button does what task. The bottom line is that the product is some 20 years old, and desperately in need of a radical makeover. For once, Adobe needs to learn a lesson from Microsoft with Office 2007 - the Ribbon may not be to everyone's taste, but Microsoft was big enough to admit those magical expanding menus were a mistake, and willing to take a risk.

This issue of ageing software is symptomatic of a wider problem too. We cling on to the "standard" ways of doing things, despite the clear fact that it might well be a completely daft way of doing the job.

Take for example SMTP (the simple message transport protocol), used by just about all email that flows around the world. This has been around since the year dot, and we are all completely wedded to it. Even big server side mail applications like Exchange Server rely on it to move emails around. But isn't it time we asked if it was actually any good, and fit for the purpose of email in the new millennium?

The reason I ask is down to spam and other types of forged emails. My server is now rejecting thousands of spam emails per day, and that's only on the primary MX record address -

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my secondaries go via my ISP, which does a fine job of killing spam too. And they handle far more on my behalf than I do, lending credence to the theory that much more spam is actually sent to secondary MX addresses than primaries, presumably hoping you didn't spot the need to filter the secondaries too.

And, for the last month, I have been bombarded by several thousand non-delivery reports per day. One of the big spamming engines has decided to put my address as the From: address in the headers, so all the non-deliverable email gets bounced back to my inbox. I didn't generate it, I didn't send it, my mail server didn't relay it, but I get the fall-out.

A couple of years ago, Bill Gates said he was going to kill off spam email. Well, it's worse now than ever, so you'd better think again about slinking off to count your billions. Your work isn't done till we get hold of this problem and start to fix it. We need more intelligence in software. It's not unreasonable that the billions spent on Microsoft Research, to name just one establishment, should be bearing fruit on this.

A mail server, presented with an email where the From: address doesn't match the server it has come from, shouldn't generate a non-delivery report - it should just drop it on the floor. Otherwise we are compounding the problem, like an irritating twonk who keeps a conversation going when you're trying to get off the phone and do something productive.

And these spam emails annoy me too - why does a mail application let me click on a URL that says "www.barclays.co.uk/login" when the underlying real URL is "www.barclays.letmestealyourmoney.ru/hahahaha/youwillfallforit"? What justification is there for software being this stupid? It should turn all clickable URLs that don't match into unclickable things, or pop up a warning saying "do you realise that this might be dodgy?"

But no, I can just click away to my heart's content, as my life savings disappear off to Moscow. Does anyone exchange any real email with Russia or these other far-flung places? Can't we just disconnect them from the internet on the grounds that they're more trouble than they're worth? Can you tell I'm annoyed?