MSN is claiming about 2.4 million spam mails a day cut by way of a round of technical applications the Internet service provision of Microsoft has developed in a multi-tiered approach.
An MSN "Image Filter" cuts the spammers off from finding new e-mail accounts by blocking images included in the spam mail and stopping the spam from loading unless the sender is in the receiver's actual contact list. The critical point, MSN said in a May 8 announcement, is that some spams include so-called Web beacons, images sending messages back to the spammer that confirm active accounts. The Image Filter lets a recipient open images manually after reviewing the rest of the contents.
MSN is also using a technique they call Human Interactive Proof technology, which requires all Hotmail customers to interpret and then retype manually a random series of partly obscured letters and numbers, shown on the signup page, in order to register a Hotmail account. This, MSN says, makes it difficult for spammers to use bots and remote scripts, among other mass spam techniques that make tracing the spammers difficult. They brought the technology online in December. "Spam is no longer just an inconvenience for consumers and the online industry; it has become a major problem, one that makes it hard for people to sort through their personal e-mail and reduces productivity. MSN drew a line in the sand," said MSN group product manager Lisa Gurry.
MSN has at least one formal endorsement for these technologies. "Families view spam as an invasion of their personal e-mail boxes and a waste of their increasingly precious time," said Good Housekeeping publisher Patricia Haegele. "We congratulate MSN for continuing to raise the bar on fighting spam. We may never rid the Internet of spam, but MSN appears determined to substantially reduce the flow."
MSN applies the multi-tier approach on the MSN 8 subscription service and MSN TV as well as Hotmail, especially since 2.4 billion spams captured a day equals about 80 percent of all e-mail messages aiming for MSN customer inboxes, the company says.
"On peak days, this large amount of spam equates to two messages for every person in China or more than eight for every person in the United States, every day," MSN says. "Over a year, it equates to over 800 billion spam e-mail messages."
MSN 8 uses three layers of filtering. One, though Brightmail and available to all 120 million international Hotmail users and all MSN TV subscribers, uses a "Probe Network" collection of e-mail addresses (over 200 million) to lure spam before it hits the inbox. A second lets a user choose from default, enhanced, and exclusive protection levels and also choose to receive mail from no one except their "safe" list of contacts already in their address book, MSN says.
The third, exclusive to MSN 8, is an advanced filter using machine learning technology letting a user "train" it to separate the wanted from the unwanted. MSN says a customer using this technique clicks either a "junk" or a "not junk" button on the mail toolbar to "train" the filter. It's available in the U.S., Canada, Britain, and Japan, and is planned for a launch into several new markets throughout the year.
