14 DAY TRIAL // Spam is a plague for which a panacea has yet to be developed, even by Microsoft, although the company’s Co-founder, Bill Gates, was promising in 2004 that it would take another couple of years at best to eradicate the problem altogether. Providers of email services continue to fight the flood of unwanted emails, and the Redmond company makes no exception to this rule. Microsoft is currently blocking 5.5 billion of spam messages every day, and has revealed that the next generation of Windows Live Hotmail will be better equipped for tackling unwanted email. One new feature added to Windows Live Hotmail Wave 4 will permit the service to travel back in time in order to fight spam.
“Time-traveling filters – We can't always identify a new spammer the moment they start sending spam. But once we identify one, we can go back and clean out spam that they’ve already sent to your inbox before you ever see it. We call this a time-traveling filter, because in some sense we are able to go back in time and get rid of the spam even after it's been delivered!” Krish Vitaldevara, senior program manager, Windows Live Hotmail, revealed.
Microsoft has also optimized features that enable it to perform advanced IP and content filtering. Hotmail leveraged SmartScreen, Microsoft’s collection of Cloud-based technologies and algorithms designed to assess each email message and decide whether it’s spam or not. SmartScreen is using machine learning and artificial intelligence, and slaps a potential spam score on each piece of email. It is because of the SmartScreen that Windows Live Hotmail filters as much as 98% of spam correctly.
“Spammer infrastructure detection and destruction – SmartScreen not only blocks spam, it uses “x-ray vision” to see behind the URLs contained in malicious email to the source URLs, which we can then block along with their IPs. This means spammers have to abandon their current infrastructure and pay for new places to hide out. By making it more expensive to continue their business, we are taking away their economic incentive,” Vitaldevara added.
Additional anti-spam features for Windows Live Hotmail 4 include personalized filtering. Microsoft is aware of the fact that the same mail that, for some users, is junk email, is completely legitimate for others. Personalized spam filters tailor the tackling of unwanted email messages to user preferences.
“Hotmail tags each message you receive, whether in your inbox or in the Junk folder, to help you understand [a] little bit more about why the message was categorized as it was. For example, if you previously marked messages from a sender as junk, we'll tell you that, or if you use a client email program with Hotmail, we'll tell you when that program has rules that result in moving a particular message to another folder. This gives you more direct control of spam management in your inbox unlike any other service,” Vitaldevara concluded.