Online antispam tools offered by Microsoft

Microsoft is beefing up its antispam efforts by offering new data services that Internet service providers can use to determine how much e-mail traffic they are generating to MSN Hotmail, how that e-mail is affected by MSN Hotmail spam filtering and what percentage has been marked as spam by customers.

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The company also debuted an MSN Postmaster Web site designed to better protect MSN Hotmail and other Internet users from spam.

In an announcement on Thursday, Microsoft said the MSN Postmaster Web site can help educate bulk e-mailers, Internet service providers and e-mail service providers about what can and can’t be sent to MSN Hotmail users. Available in 10 languages, MSN Postmaster offers updated information and tools for fighting junk e-mail, improving delivery of legitimate bulk e-mail messages, streamlining the reporting of e-mail abuse and troubleshooting, according to Microsoft.

As part of the MSN Postmaster launch, Microsoft also unveiled its Smart Network Data Services, which reports on a variety of characteristics of e-mail sent to MSN Hotmail.

Using that information, Internet service providers can identify and clean compromised machines, bolster security measures for the host or network, or determine whether a mail sender is distributing spam or legitimate e-mail.

Both services are designed to complement industry efforts -- such as the use of e-mail authentication mechanisms like the Sender ID Framework -- to help reduce spam, phishing scams and viruses, according to the company.

"MSN Postmaster and Smart Data Network Services represent a move by Microsoft toward broader, more-comprehensive and transparent information-sharing with ISPs and e-mail senders to help protect e-mail," Kevin Doerr, product unit manager for MSN Hotmail at Microsoft, said in a statement. "With over 200 million active e-mail accounts worldwide, MSN Hotmail is in a unique position to collect and analyze e-mail activity data.”

In January, MSN Hotmail implemented Sender ID, an e-mail authentication technology, to fight the problem of domain spoofing.

“Without knowing the full details of exactly what data the Smart Data Network Services are collecting, it's unclear if this is similar to or exactly the same as the information that SenderBase provides in showing trending information and other statistical measurements,” said Dan Keldsen, an analyst at Boston-based Delphi Group. “The notion of scrubbing 'phishy' URLs is an interesting one, although you have to hope that in the case of false positives, there is a way to get the URL back from the clutches of Hotmail.

“Building in Sender ID alerting within the Hotmail interface to alert users when Sender ID is not being used is an interesting idea, although as it turns out, spammers have been among the quickest adopters of Sender ID, as it further muddies the ability of spam-detection engines to easily filter on that flag alone,” he said. “The goal of spammers and phishers is to look just enough like real e-mail that they can slip by the filters and nab the unwary.”