Hotmail's never-ending war on spam

New version adds more tools, but users consider Hotmail ads spam, too

Coming improvements to Microsoft's Windows Live Hotmail have centered around online editing functions for Office documents, full session SSL encryption, 10GBs of online photos storage and an improved experience on mobile devices -- all designed to keep Hotmail competitive with rival Google whose Gmail and Google Docs offerings are also free. But I think a little time should be set aside to look at how the new Hotmail is designed to thwart a problem notoriously associated with Hotmail: Spam.

Krish Vitaldevara, senior program manager for Windows Live Hotmail, focused on spam fighting features of Live Hotmail in a May 20 blog post. In a word association game, Hotmail equals spam, as well as does Yahoo. In the past, spammers mercilessly pounded Hotmail and Yahoo accounts because they were so ubiquitous. All they had to do was throw a combination of letters and numbers together and then add @hotmail.com or @yahoo.com and they'd get pretty lucky. Vitaldevara says Microsoft has been working for five years to harden Hotmail against spam and has been successful at blocking 98 percent of the unwanted, and sometimes malicious, messages, a total of about 5.5 billion messages per day (Isn't that sad?).

It's main weapon has been SmartScan, a set of algorithms and other tools designed to assign a "spam probability" to incoming messages. But since the spammers never rest, neither can Microsoft.

Among the additional features of the new Hotmail is more advanced IP and content filtering. As it continues to screen messages for spam, Hotmail continues to "learn" about how to identify spam, so each new message improves its intelligence.

SmartScreen also uses "x-ray vision," Vitaldevara wrote, to see not just the IP address from which the spam was sent, but also the source URL. That way, once a spammer is prevented from from sending spam from one URL, it has to establish another one. "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," he noted.

The new Hotmail will also use "time travel" to, having just identified a message as spam, go back and block previous messages from the same source and keep them out of the user's inbox.

Another new feature is personalized spam filtering where decisions on what to block are informed by a user's preference settings. Many other accounts may regard e-mail form one sender as spam, but another may welcome the messages.

Lastly, Hotmail seeks to improve spam protection by tagging messages it sends to the spam folder to better inform the user why it sent the message there. It may be because the user previously labeled messages from that sender as junk, or it may be that the user is viewing Hotmail messages through a client e-mail program, which may have its own spam filtering rules.

As much appreciated as the improvements may be, one Hotmail spam problem remains -- the ads IN Hotmail. One commentor lamented that "I can't do simple things like sign out ... change Hotmail options, or view e-mails in full view without accidentally clicking on a floating Flash ad? Do you still refuse to acknowledge the problem?"

Vitaldevara didn't respond to the question, but the response, "advertising is what makes Hotmail free" comes to mind. Still, another commentor suggested Hotmail follow the lead of Yahoo and offer a pay-per-year subscription to Hotmail "to remove ads and get even more storage? That would be nice."

As Hotmail incoporates these new features into the service, let me know what your experiences are like and whether you see an improvement in spam protection.

Here's a slide show with a good overview of Hotmail's new capabilities.

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