Microsoft Anti-Spam Strategy (1)
Bluetooth 24 June 2004

We all know how tedious it is to go about reading through tons of emails especially after you are back from holiday. Worst of all, almost 50% of the mails you got are spam mails coming from unknown sources and they do affect your daily work as you might miss out important emails from your customers or worst still mails from your boss.

One of the challenges by Microsoft is to help its customers minimise and cut off the amount of spam received daily. If you use Outlook 2003, we can already see that the anti spamming filter helps a lot. Although this helps to keep our mail folders clean, but we are still paying CPU cycles or bandwidth to download these mails and some of them comes with large attachments.

Last week, Ryan Hamlin, General Manager of the Anti-Spam Technology and Strategy Group was here in Singapore to host a round table conference to share with the local media on what Microsoft has in plans to address the spam issue.

In his 50 minutes speech, Ryan believes that spam can be contained through the effective cooperation of ISP, ESPs, technology companies, industry and government. He highlighted 5 important areas, which through a coordinated approach can reduce and contained spam, they are - Technology, Consumer Education, Enforcement, Legislation and Self-Regulation.

On page 2, a discussion was made on caller-id for email, cpu cycles for email and a trustee based email.

Next >>>

Technology

Microsoft's patented SmartScreen technology has been in place on MSN, Hotmail, Microsoft Outlook and Exchange. It has proven to work and reduced the amount of spam. The Outlook 2003 Junk E-Mail Filter with Microsoft SmartScreen Technology. The Junk E-Mail Filter learns the definitions of what characterizes good e-mail and spam and, after inspecting a particular e-mail message in Outlook 2003, makes a decision (based on probability) on the likelihood of that message being spam. Microsoft recently announced the Coordinated Spam Reduction Initiative and doing testing on Sender-ID for E-Mail.

Sender ID will verify that each e-mail message originates from the Internet domain it claims to come from based on the sender's server IP address. Eliminating domain spoofing will help legitimate senders protect their domain names and reputations, and help recipients more effectively identify and filter junk e-mail.

The Sender ID specification is the convergence of Microsoft's Caller ID for E-Mail proposal and Meng Wong's Sender Policy Framework (SPF).

Self-Regulation

Microsoft continues to work with leading ESP, ISP through collaboration and help drive industry standards. To facilitate self-regulation, Microsoft supports the establishment of an independent trust authority providing online  email certification and customer dispute services.

Legislation

More countries have new laws enforced on spamming. With more of such regulations in place in countries worldwide, it would definitely help to reduce the amount of spam.

Consumer Education

Microsoft has a website http://www.microsoft.com/spam which educate users on how to prevent spam. There are tips and tricks so that users are protected from spams.

Enforcement

Microsoft continues to work with governments across the globe to take legal action to the harm spammers. In 2003, 66 lawsuits were filed. He believes that only with legal actions will put this spammers out.

Next >>>

(C) Copyright 1998-2009 OCWorkbench.com