Microsoft Offers Tools to Spamming ISPs

Michael writes "Computer Business Review reports that 'Internet service providers curious to know how much spam they are sending Hotmail users will be able to get detailed reports on the topic, courtesy of a service Microsoft launched in beta yesterday.' Microsoft's new Smart Network Data Services, a part of the larger MSN Portmaster initiative, allows the owners of IP blocks to view reports on the volume of email being sent from their networks to Hotmail users, and see how much of that email is being flagged as spam."

Comments

Re:You aren't very smart, are you?

[javaxman]

This includes spam that users themselves mark as such. Very smart idea if ISPs actually use it.

Even better. If you are a spammer, this gives you the most useful data ever: how much of my spam is actually being recognized as spam? I'd want my spam messages to be so clever or so interesting that users don't readily figure out that it's spam.

Of course, I'm not a spammer, and few who stoop to such pathetic marketing tactics would think enough to craft a message that ( to a person ) in not easily recognizable as spam, so I guess you have a point.

wow

[Tweak232]

Wow, I better change from gmail, and get a BETTER e-mail account at hotmail.

I would get better spam protection right? lol

Re:fp

[jjeffries]

Judging from the logs of my mail filters, about 2% of the mail that is marked up by SA as spam comes from @hotmail.com addresses. Thursday, for example, my filters saw 21,863 messages that were marked as spam, and 356 of those have @hotmail.com addresses.

When you look at where these messages are coming from, though, and compare them to the IPs hotmail uses for outgoing smtp... I don't actually see any messages that really came from them--they are almost entirely forged addresses.

Not that I have any love of MS/Hotmail, just sayin'.