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.

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...