Hotmail's fight against spam has certainly come a long way in the last five years. Over the last several years we've made substantial investments in the research and development of sophisticated anti-spam technologies. SmartScreen is the collective name we use for a cloud-based set of technologies and...

Now that the new generation of Windows Live web services has been released, some of you have asked me why we didn’t make any changes to Spaces. Although we did not make many noticeable changes to the service, I wanted to do a blog post about Spaces within the broader context of Windows Live and show...

Starting today, you can create and manage multiple email aliases from a single Hotmail account. Together with features that we introduced in November that let you use Hotmail with any existing email address , the new aliasing feature makes it easy to use a different email address and still get all the...

Hi, my name is John Scarrow and, in conjunction with other product groups, I oversee service abuse and security issues for Windows Live and other Microsoft products such as Internet Explorer. Building from Dick Craddock’s previous post , I’m going to get into the nuts and bolts of how we fight phishing...

Every e-mail system has spam, and Hotmail is no exception. However, our SmartScreen™ spam-fighting system is one of the most effective in the industry. This post will give you the inside scoop on how we use it to fight the menace that is spam, and what you can do to help. Spam is war Why do people send...

Windows Live is entrusted with safekeeping the email, contacts, photos, documents, and more that over 500 million people bring to our services each month. Today is worldwide Data Privacy Day , and we’re observing it by focusing on a critical way to help keep your data private: protecting it from account...

SmartScreen®—it’s not just for spam anymore. The latest release of Hotmail uses Microsoft SmartScreen to automatically identify more than a billion newsletters every day. Since newsletters account for more than a quarter of all the mail in a typical inbox, having them automatically categorized is a big...

At Hotmail, we know that account hijacking is a big problem, and we continue to work hard to prevent it. We’ve noticed a couple of things about hijacked accounts. First, many accounts have weak passwords that make them easy targets for hijackers. Second, when someone’s account gets hijacked, their friends...

Hotmail introduced advanced features for fighting the war on graymail this past fall, and since then, customers have conquered graymail over 100 million times using features like Sweep and Schedule Cleanup. In this post, I’ll talk about how Hotmail customers are taking control of their email with Sweep...

Hotmail has come a long way in spam protection and is now among the best in the industry in keeping spam out of your i nbox. Our own internal metrics, customer feedback, and even a recent third-party report confirms that no mail service offers better protection than Hotmail. You can read all about it...

I'd like to talk a bit about how we determine the reputation of different URLs and IPs and use this to protect against spam, phishing, and other abuse in Internet Explorer and Windows Live Hotmail . Let's start with a bit of background. When an abuser–a spammer, phisher, or malware distributer–attacks...

In previous posts on our blog, we talked about how we’ve reduced true spam in the inbox to under 3% using SmartScreen™ filtering. But we realized that getting rid of true spam wasn’t enough, because 75% of the email messages that people reported as spam are really legitimate newsletters, offers, or notifications...

Over the last few months, we’ve focused this blog on our current software and services – how we build them and how they're used around the world. We’ve also talked about trends we’ve observed both in the use of our services and in our research with customers. Today marks the point where we shift the...

If you take a look through Dick Craddock’s blog post from earlier this year, A short history of Hotmail , or A peek behind the scenes at Hotmail , by Arthur de Haan , you’ll see that Hotmail has experienced enormous growth since it started 15 years ago. Today it delivers a service that is localized to...

Hi, my name is Dick Craddock and I’m the Group Program Manager for Windows Live Hotmail . “Group Program Manager” is just a fancy way of saying that I manage the team of Program Managers at Hotmail. We have the job of planning each Hotmail release and managing that release from beginning to end. We pick...

This post will give a bit more depth on SmartScreen® and our approach to spam filtering, and on a particularly evil kind of spam called a phishing attack. I'll' also explain why individual e-mail accounts experience different levels of spam, and what you can do to reduce spam in your own account...

Hello – Thanks to all for the first round of comments.  As I said in my previous post , this is the start of a two-way conversation intended to discuss how we build and operate our services. We love all the comments and suggestions and we’ll read every one.  I’ve responded privately to more...

Windows Live Messenger is both a powerful and fun communications tool for staying in touch with your friends, family and co-workers.  It is a semi-enclosed environment where you can freely interact with the people you know and trust – the people in your network. Unfortunately, over the last couple...

We’ve posted quite a bit recently about the work we’re doing to prevent spam on Windows Live ( Just say no to bogus Messenger invitations , Preventing spam and phishing using e-mail authentication , Spam, phishing, and other annoyances , and Fighting the war on spam ). In our fight against spam, we sometimes...