By David Gewirtz
Microsoft recently announced a series of powerful anti-spam initiatives. OutlookPower wanted to make sure we really understood Microsoft's plans and intentions, so last week, I held a fascinating email interview with George Webb, Microsoft's Business Manager, Anti-spam Technology and Strategy Group, shown in Figure A.
FIGURE A
George Webb, Microsoft's Business Manager, Anti-spam Technology and Strategy Group (click for larger image)
Here's the full interview. It's a really good read.
OutlookPower:Can you please provide a short explanation of Microsoft's anti-spam initiatives?
Webb:Microsoft has made a serious commitment to work alongside industry and government to fight spam on many fronts. The company believes it will take a combination of advanced technology, industry self-regulation, consumer education, effective legislation and targeted enforcement against illegal spammers to significantly reduce and solve the spam problem.
- Microsoft is investing heavily in R&D that will unveil and develop a variety of new technologies to contain spam
- Microsoft is improving their machine learning technologies like the SmartScreen filter, which gets smarter by incorporating the feedback of Hotmail customers as to what is spam and what is not
- Microsoft is partnering with industry and governments to increase the risk and reduce the incentive of spammers around the world
What exactly is "spoofing"?
Webb:Spammers use spoofing to make an email appear to come from another user other than themselves in an attempt to trick filters that the email is coming from a legitimate source. Spoofing has unfortunately become a fairly common practice, as the FTC recently reported that around 50% of spam sent today contains spoofed domain names. Microsoft has developed Caller-ID for Email as a proposal to enable better filtering through the prevention of domain spoofing by helping to confirm an email came from the domain it claims to have come from.
OutlookPower:How did spam become such a problem to begin with?
Webb:Spam is a problem because of the strong economic incentives involved -- it's a profitable business today with relatively little cost to send bulk spam email. (Recent anecdotal reports indicate that, on average, if just one in 100,000 people respond to a piece of spam and make a purchase, that is enough for that spammer to retain a healthy profit for their efforts.) That is why Microsoft's anti-spam efforts are laser-focused on turning that model around to change the economic incentives and make it prohibitively expensive to send spam.
