Microsoft Steps Up Anti-Spam Efforts

An anonymous reader writes "Bill Gates announces new focus at Microsoft to abolish spam. Read the announcement titled Toward a Spam-Free Future."

Comments

yea right.

[malocchio]

Self-regulation needs to be supported by strong federal legislation that empowers consumers without threatening the vitality of legitimate e-commerce. Our proposal is to create a regulatory "safe harbor" status for senders who comply with guidelines. The guidelines would be subject to approval by the Federal Trade Commission. Compliance would be confirmed by a self-regulatory body. Senders who do not comply would have to insert an "ADV:" label, for advertisement, in the subject line of all unsolicited commercial e-mail.

Lemme guess, once its approved by the FTC the software will be available for purchase from your spam-hating friends at Microsoft!

I personally dont hate spam enough to subscribe to a national service. And what about non-American email? Would be automatically filtered as and ADV?

Nice try, Mr. Gates.

Pop-up blocking anyone?

[Read Icculus]

How about adding pop-up blocking to IE? That would show a real commitment to "eliminating spam".

OK, I give up Bill.

[GeneralEmergency]

Exactly how does Microsoft profit from eliminating spam? Unless of course you are planning to introduce a whole new mail system protocol based upon the Palladium security model...

...shit...never mind. Damn it, I did it again.

Micro$oft Abolishes All Spam*

[SkewlD00d]

* = except their own spam and their VAR partners and other 3rd parties.

Yahoo!, AOL abolish spam and pop-ups**

** = except their own, of course.

This is another attempt of companies using reverse-issue support to get their way, to be seen as so-called do-gooders, but in reality they're making back-room deals to slip their exclusions in to rig the system in their favor. It's another day of lobbying as usual in Congress, w/ some nice "conference" vacations, comps and perks to get some ear-time. *wink-wink, nudge-nudge*

Re:Aaahh

[letxa2000]

There's nothing interesting in this article except that it is Bill Gates who wrote it. There is also a hint that maybe they are implementing Bayesian filters in Hotmail and Outlook--that's the easiest way to make a "learning filter", as he describes it.

Other than that, nothing particularly new or earth-shattering in this article.

Too little, too late?

[Trepalium]

I don't know about anyone else, but we recently resorted to forcing all incoming SMTP traffic into Linux mail servers so it can be spam filtered before hitting the internal Exchange servers. Nearly all the Exchange spam filtering products were either ineffective, too restrictive, far too expensive, or snake oil. We couldn't block everyone who was listed on the RBLs because sometimes our customers (new or old) end up getting listed on those because of a configuration problem, so those products were out (including Exchange 2003's built-in spam filtering). We weren't about to use products that filtered based on two dozen keywords, and a half-dozen e-mail address domains (including hotmail.com, yahoo.com, etc.). Distributed checksum tools were generally reliable, however, they also caught things like mailing lists, which was a problem (and the fact that in report only mode, they just add a header which can't be used with Outlook rules). The only product that we found that was suitable was SpamKiller from McAfee, but it was too expensive. So, instead with the new firewall, we just routed the mail through qmail and let SpamAssassin tag mail it thinks is spam.

After all of this, I'm not sure which is worse -- anti-virus companies, or anti-spam companies...

Re:Too little, too late?

[nexus987]

Yeah, we're doing the spamassassin/exchange thing where I work too, and it works very well. An added bonus is that you can choose to use/not to use it on an individual basis, so if a co-worker tries it and doesn't like it, they can just turn it off. I've also been screwing around with Active Spam Killer on my e-mail account (in combination with spamassassin, to block the blatantly obvious spam). This combination has blocked all but two spams in three months I've been using it - and I used to get 50+ spams a day. I was able to track down the originators of both of the offending spams very easily because they had to reveal their valid IP addresses. I'd say ASK / TMDA is tantilizingly close to being the perfect anti-spam system. Getting the whitelists set up was slightly painful, and one of the mailing lists I subscribe to recently changed their "From:" address without warning, which caused some problems (VERY sorry guys). If someone could just come up with a standard for ASK/TMDA and mailing list interaction (like ignoring out of office messages posted to mailing lists) things would be GREAT. I've seen a lot of slashdot posts from people saying "dump the SMTP protocol and invent something new". I don't think that's going to happen in our lifetimes (just like IPv6 may never be widely adopted). This seems like a much more workable solution, and something that could be implemented relatively quickly. Granted, the spam would still take up bandwith and disk space with this method, but if the messages don't get through then economics takes over (IE: if it's not profitable, people won't spam).

What Great Writing! I'm serious

[loomis]

This writer is really good. A strong spam-is-a-bacteria spin/fud method is used successfully throughout the article. It raises fear and anxiety in the reader akin to that of a virus, perhaps more poignant in these times of SARS:

"Unsolicited commercial email is a spreading plague that feeds[. . .]."

"[. . .]pollution of the email ecosystem."

"Bringing Spammers into the Sunshine," "isolation," "epidemic."

With the aid of Microsoft I will, according to the author's true message, be eating a diet of good email, exercising, and going outdors so to speak, and thus be protecting myself (or recovering) from the disease that is killing oh so many email users.

Bravo on the style

Loomis

Thanks, Microsoft :)

[Cloud K]

Never thought I'd say those two words in the same sentence without a "no" and a "to" in there somewhere!

Perhaps they saw my comment conveying the idea on the UK to hold public enquiry on spam story a few days ago ;)

No doubt it was really quite a common theory. I stand by what was said back there... Microsoft Outlook / Outlook Express, whether or not the Slashdot or Linux community wish it, *are* for sure the most common email clients.

As one person on the thread quite rightly put it, it's normally the Microsoft users (granny, mom, joe sixpack et al) who are uninformed enough to respond to spam in the first place, making the business thrive. Helping them not to see it can only kill off the spam industry, surely. I hope so. Commonplace spam filtering "on every desktop" (as Gates would put it) can only be a good thing.

As such, I'd like to say a very rare "thanks Microsoft, good luck"

Re:FIRST POST

[Anonymous Coward]

although i am very pleased to see that no one has turned this story around to make it seem like MS is doing something wrong, i still have yet to see anyone say "go MS!". Don't let your feelings get in the way, go ahead and join me.

GO MS!!!

Spam is NOT a problem anymore! Yes, I said that!

[Eric_Cartman_South_P]

Spend an hour with Popmail at:

http://popfile.sourceforge.net/

and spam will disappear. It is the BEST baysinian-thingy spam-mail-proxy stuff I've ever used. I'll stop being so technical and just say TRY IT. Setup your proxy, and watch it rip. In over 400 e-mails I've had ZERO false positives (setup the "magnets" when you get started.). And for Windoze users, yes it runs great on Windoze and is EASY to setup.

So do I still hate spam? Sure. Because it's there. Because it costs money and takes resources from the web. But it is NOT a problem in my life and should not be in yours. The last thing we need is POP3 and SMTP to become "Palladium Improved". Let the world know, starting with yourself, that baysani-something-like proxy's work great.

Oh, and if you use hotmail, never log into their crappy site again, while still getting your hotmail e-mail and spam free at that! Use Popfile, a pop3 proxy from www.boolean.ca. that knows how to speak Hotmail! Now you simply have this:

Hotmail -> Popfile -> PopMail -> Inbox.

Poof! Hotmail and every other account you have, all pulled down into one application spam free (yeah, Popfile supports unlimited accounts). Sweet.

Re:Definite irony

[furchin]

Since you never gave this address to anyone, the only possible way the spammers got the address is because Microsoft sold it to them.

It doesn't happen to be possible that spammers know there are a lot of hotmail users, and thus spammers use a dictionary attack to generate random usernames? No, that's silly. Much easier to blame MS which is suing spammers and trying to ease at least some of the spam problem, than it is to blame Alan Ralsky sitting in his basement sending you spam.

Hotmail? Spam City!

[geoff lane]

I recently created a new hotmail account with a name that would not be found using any dictionary search. I selected _every_ privacy option I could find. Nobody but me and hotmail knew of the new account.

Within 6 hours I started to receive spam.

Hotmail _must_ be leaking registration information from somewhere.