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Krebs on Microsoft Suspending "Patch Tuesday" Emails and Blaming Canada
tsu doh nimh writes In a move that may wind up helping spammers, Microsoft is blaming a new Canadian anti-spam law for the company's recent decision to stop sending regular emails about security updates for its Windows operating system and other Microsoft software. Some anti-spam experts who worked very closely on Canada's Anti-Spam Law (CASL) say they are baffled by Microsoft's response to a law which has been almost a decade in the making. Indeed, an exception in the law says it does not apply to commercial electronic messages that solely provide "warranty information, product recall information or safety or security information about a product, goods or a service that the person to whom the message is sent uses, has used or has purchased." Several people have observed that Microsoft likely is using the law as a convenient excuse for dumping an expensive delivery channel.
for the windows crowd: Unix Linux and BSD sending and receiving an email is pretty mundane business (even to millions of people.) Sendmail begat postfix, which tidied up the nuts and bolts of SMTP in the land of penguins neckbeards and that cartoon blowfish you occasionally see.
sending email from Exchange is orders of magnitude more complex by the nature of Exchange as a monolithic communications product. Because exchange does scheduling, calendaring, contacts, unified messaging, failover management, automatic load balancing, remote configuration management, archival, database storage, advanced RBAC permission delegation and cool stuff like shadow redundancy, outlook servers themselves have become increasingly divorced from the RFC for the SMTP. It isnt a bad thing for businesses that rely on being constantly connected, but it does mean the simple act of sending an email means relying on what for us would be an OS in itself. Exchange 2013 requires 2 gigabytes of free disk and recommends 16 gigabytes of free RAM. To compare and contrast, many in the BSD community can handle millions of messages per day with 2 gigabytes of ram and 1 gigabyte of free disk. that includes storage for the message being sent.
I think microsoft is doing this because exchange wasnt designed to just "send an email" anymore. it expects interactivity, redundancy, and universal access to the information being sent by default. the *nix solution runs hard and fast, but as an SMTP implementation requires significantly more engineering to provide the same level of service and feature set as outlook.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Specifically,
Basic Alerts: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/security/rss/bulletin
Comprehensive Alerts: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/security/rss/comprehensive
Security Advisories Alerts: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/security/rss/advisory
Microsoft Security Response Center Blog Alerts: http://blogs.technet.com/b/msrc/rss.aspx