November 17, 2003

Microsoft Offers Technology Designed to Help Protect Inboxes From Spam

Microsoft Research's Patented Spam-Filtering SmartScreen Technology To Be Applied Across Microsoft's E-Mail Platforms, Including New Microsoft Exchange Intelligent Message Filter

Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ:MSFT) today announced at COMDEX Las Vegas 2003 that as part of the company's coordinated anti-spam effort, its spam-filtering SmartScreen Technology will be deployed across Microsoft's e-mail platforms. Developed by Microsoft(R) Research, early versions of SmartScreen Technology have already been introduced in Outlook(R) 2003, MSN(R) 8 and Hotmail(R) and will soon be available in a new add-on for Exchange Server 2003 called Microsoft Exchange Intelligent Message Filter.

SmartScreen Technology is designed to provide the latest anti-spam filtering innovations to products and tools that help protect corporate and private e-mail users from the growing deluge of spam, typically defined as unsolicited, unwanted e-mail, and more specifically defined by Microsoft as unsolicited bulk or unsolicited commercial e-mail. This patented technology is based on a machine-learning approach, where decisions regarding whether e-mail would be considered spam are made by e-mail customers themselves and then incorporated into a feedback loop to train the filter to know what to look for. Hundreds of thousands of Hotmail subscribers have volunteered to classify millions of e-mail messages as legitimate or as spam, generating more than 500,000 characteristics of spam that the SmartScreen Technology can track. With the Exchange Intelligent Message Filter, Exchange 2003 customers can score each incoming e-mail message for spam probability according to these characteristics and can use that score to help filter spam before it reaches the user's inbox.

My spin: I get hundreds of spam messages a day - this announcement is welcome. HOWEVER, for me, Earthlink's spamblocker does just fine.

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