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

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*

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...

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.