Windows Live Hotmail Vacation Replies Feature Switched Off

Spam continues to plague email inboxes everywhere, but nowhere is the true size of this epidemic more visible than in the statistics provided by companies such as Microsoft, which operates Windows Live Hotmail. Fact is that unwanted messages surpass genuine emails by over 2 to 1, according to the Redmond company, and spammers are working tirelessly in order to circumvent spam filters and mitigations set in their way. Sometimes, they even use legitimate email tools to spread spam.

It is the case of the vacation Replies feature in Windows Live Hotmail, which Microsoft switched off. “In our fight against spam, we sometimes have to make hard choices, and we had to make one this week. We discovered that spammers were using Hotmail’s automatic vacation reply feature to send spam from their Hotmail accounts. We decided to temporarily shut off the feature in order to shut down the spam,” Krish Vitaldevara, lead program manager, Windows Live Hotmail, explained.

Earlier this week, Phil Smoot, partner development manager, Windows Live Hotmail, reiterated that Hotmail had grown to process in excess of eight billion emails per day. However, only 2.5 billion of these messages are genuine, and actually make it to inboxes. The rest of 5.5 billion are blocked by spam filters. The promise from Microsoft is that it will turn Vacation Replies back on, once it finds a solution to block spammers from abusing the feature.

“Of course, we know some of you like and use automatic vacation replies to let people know when you can’t respond to e-mail for a while, and we’ll turn this feature back on as soon as we’ve worked out the best way to prevent it from being misused by spammers. I apologize to all of you who use this feature for any inconvenience we’ve caused,” Vitaldevara added.