According to InfoWorld, "Microsoft Corp. Chairman and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates will use his keynote address on Sunday at the annual Comdex 2003 trade show in Las Vegas to announce plans to make the company's Exchange e-mail server better at stopping unsolicited commercial ("spam") e-mail, according to information obtained by IDG News Service."
"The new anti-spam feature, which Microsoft is calling the Exchange Intelligent Message Filter (IMF), uses heuristics technology developed internally at Microsoft, according to the information."
"Among other things, Gates will announce that Microsoft is adding heuristics-based anti-spam capabilities to future releases of Exchange Server 2003, which will enable Exchange Server to stop spam e-mail messages before they reach users' e-mail inboxes."
"Information from Microsoft's Hotmail free Web-based e-mail service will be used to keep the Microsoft heuristics database up-to-date on the most recent spam trends."
"The new antispam features will be offered to customers who sign on to Microsoft's Software Assurance program, which streamlines licensing different Microsoft products and gives customers automatic product update rights. A beta version of the antispam features will be available within a month, but Microsoft is not saying when the features will be generally available to Exchange customers, according to sources familiar with the company's plans."
News source: InfoWorld
"The new anti-spam feature, which Microsoft is calling the Exchange Intelligent Message Filter (IMF), uses heuristics technology developed internally at Microsoft, according to the information."
"Among other things, Gates will announce that Microsoft is adding heuristics-based anti-spam capabilities to future releases of Exchange Server 2003, which will enable Exchange Server to stop spam e-mail messages before they reach users' e-mail inboxes."
"Information from Microsoft's Hotmail free Web-based e-mail service will be used to keep the Microsoft heuristics database up-to-date on the most recent spam trends."
"The new antispam features will be offered to customers who sign on to Microsoft's Software Assurance program, which streamlines licensing different Microsoft products and gives customers automatic product update rights. A beta version of the antispam features will be available within a month, but Microsoft is not saying when the features will be generally available to Exchange customers, according to sources familiar with the company's plans."
News source: InfoWorld
"A decision to move to a server-based approach to fighting spam would not be surprising, especially since Microsoft did not add to enhance anti-spam features in the recent Outlook e-mail client, which was released in October as part of Office 2003, according to John Pescatore, an analyst at Gartner Inc.
"It's a lot more effective to do (anti-spam scanning) on the server end, " Pescatore said.
While viruses and worms may be more destructive, spam is the number one problem identified by e-mail users, according to James Kobielus, a senior analyst Burton Group.
"People worry about viruses like they worry about terrorist attacks. (Viruses) are highly destructive, but they're also more manageable in terms of (an e-mail user's) day-to-day stress level than spam," he said."
Of course, then you don't know that all of your emails with the words 'Linux' in the title are being deleted before you see them. Or that the emails from your Aunt Petunia who's exicted because she just figured out this 'new fangled email thingy' are being erroneously marked as spam as well.
Of course, the only fix to that is to send the Outlook user spam, with the exchange server putting some kind of 'spam' flag on it - but if that's the case, why not just filter on the client level?
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