Bill Gates: Progress Report on SPAM

Bill Gates has issued a report on the current status of stopping SPAM made by Microsoft. Already steady progress has been made from the deployment of SmartScreen (Microsoft spam-filtering technology). That's present in MSN 8, MSN Premium, MSN Hotmail, and Outlook 2003. Still this isn't enough as Bill Gates reviews alternatives to fighting SPAM.

I'd like to update you on the progress that Microsoft and our industry are making to curb the epidemic of junk email. Since I sent a message to customers on this subject a year ago, we've made significant advances against spam. It's still a major problem — an invasion of privacy, a costly drain on time and resources and, as a carrier of worms and viruses, a significant threat to computer security. The good news is that billions of junk emails are being blocked every day, and spamming has become a more difficult and less rewarding business.

Much of the improvement Microsoft customers have experienced so far has resulted from broad deployment of SmartScreen, our advanced spam-filtering technology. SmartScreen has provided a significant benefit to users of MSN 8 and MSN Premium, MSN Hotmail and Outlook 2003. Since Hotmail deployed it six months ago, SmartScreen has been blocking more than 95 percent of all incoming spam — an average of nearly 3 billion messages every day. Because we believe that SmartScreen is crucial to the war against spam, we recently began making it available free to all users of Exchange Server 2003, via a download of the Exchange Intelligent Message Filter from www.microsoft.com/exchange.

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