Friday, February 27, 2004 6:47 PM bart

Anti-spam technology in development

Microsoft has announced the Caller ID technology to reduce spam on the internet. Currently, my mailbox has a spam-regular mail ratio of 82:14 (that's less than 20 percent of the mail is 'valid mail', believe it or not but the document on Microsoft's spam site mentions the spam rate on Hotmail which was identical to the spam rate I have on my machine right now: "As of mid-2003, about 83% of the e-mail messages received by Microsoft® Hotmail® on a typical day are spam"). Microsoft has built spam-technology already which is included in Exchange 2003 and Office 2003. For example, thanks to the SmartScreen technology built in into Office Outlook 2003 that 82 junk mail messages in my mailbox were filtered out on my machine. The SmartScreen technology works with statistical analysis of mails on Hotmail and those stats are used to calculate the probability that a mail is 'junk mail' (this check is done for every mail which is not in the trusted senders list). However, spam has a huge impact on the overall traffic on the internet and should be reduced for this reason as well. The Caller ID technology checks - this is only a simplified summary - whether a mail that arrives on a mail server with some specific domain name was sent from a server which is legible to send mail for that domain. By doing such a check, spoofing can be reduced dramatically (being  a solution in the fight against spam). The whole technical spec is on-line for two weeks now and can be found on www.microsoft.com/spam. The first tests of this pilot technology will be done on Microsoft's Hotmail mail service and will become available later as a plug-in to Exchange mail servers. Anti-spam is also on the feature list of upcoming products such as Longhorn - which is the next major release of the Windows operating system on the client-side.Del.icio.us | Digg It | Technorati | Blinklist | Furl | reddit | DotNetKicks

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# re: Anti-spam technology in development

Thursday, June 24, 2004 5:49 PM by bart

Solving the spam problem with Caller ID technology would be great.
But according to experts, this technology has both strong points and weaknesses. It requires mail servers to download the entire content of spam messages, then it only checks for it for the sender IP address before rejecting them.
The Microsoft Outlook 2003 spam filter wasn’t good enough for me too, so I installed a plug-in for Outlook - <a href="http://www.spambully.com/">Spambully</a>. It’s a Bayesian spam filter and works almost perfect for me.

# re: Anti-spam technology in development

Thursday, June 24, 2004 5:51 PM by bart

Solving the spam problem with Caller ID technology would be great.
But according to experts, this technology has both strong points and weaknesses. It requires mail servers to download the entire content of spam messages, then it only checks for it for the sender IP address before rejecting them.
The Microsoft Outlook 2003 spam filter wasn’t good enough for me too, so I installed a plug-in for Outlook - Spambully (http://www.spambully.com). It’s a Bayesian spam filter and works almost perfect for me.