Comdex: Microsoft builds spam filters into Exchange

IDG News Service - Microsoft Corp. Chairman and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates will use his keynote address Sunday at the Comdex 2003 trade show in Las Vegas to announce plans to make the company's Exchange e-mail server better at stopping spam, according to information obtained by IDG News Service.
Among other things, Gates will announce that Microsoft is adding heuristics-based antispam capabilities to future releases of Exchange Server 2003, which will enable Exchange Server to stop spam before it reaches users' in-boxes.
Microsoft declined to comment in detail about Gates' keynote talk, but a spokesman did confirm that the company is making an announcement that pertains to spam and Exchange.
Heuristics antispam technology analyzes patterns of content in large numbers of messages, using that information to screen out new threats. The technology is considered more flexible and effective than so-called signature-based antispam products, which identify spam messages by matching them to copies of messages that have already been received.
The new antispam feature, which Microsoft is calling the Exchange Intelligent Message Filter (IMF), uses heuristics technology developed internally at Microsoft, according to the information.
Information from Hotmail, Microsoft's free Web-based e-mail service, will be used to keep the Microsoft heuristics database up to date on the latest spam trends.
The new antispam features will be offered to customers who sign on to Microsoft's Software Assurance program, which streamlines the licensing of 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 isn't saying when the features will be generally available to Exchange customers, according to sources familiar with the company's plans.
Gates' Comdex keynote addresses are a staple of the annual industry trade show and are often used to highlight key initiatives at the company.
Last year, Gates described a world of consumer applications for his company's software, including the Tablet PC, software to replace the paper notepad and home entertainment systems powered by the Windows operating system.
However, a spate of virus and worm outbreaks targeting Microsoft's products and the company's recent disclosure that security concerns were eating into its licensing revenue have pushed existing software security talk to the forefront of the company's public relations efforts.

In recent weeks, Gates has publicly said that Microsoft will continue to invest some of its research and development budget in designing software that can prevent attacks, including spam.
Microsoft introduced several new features in Exchange 2003, which was released in October, that were designed to help stop spam and e-mail-borne viruses. Those include a feature that enables third-party antispam vendors to assign a spam "confidence rating" to incoming e-mail messages. Exchange administrators can then use a spam confidence "threshold." Messages with a confidence rating above the threshold level automatically get quarantined or sent to a junk mail folder.
Most antivirus software vendors have also moved in the past year to integrate antispam technology with their products, responding to rapid growth in the volume of unwanted e-mail messages.
In recent days, Microsoft has briefed antivirus vendors on its plans, telling them that it wants to work with them to stop spam using a multiple-filter approach, that its IMF lacks features they have in their products and that all the parties involved are better off working together to fight spam, according to a source at a leading antivirus company.
A decision to move to a server-based approach to fighting spam wouldn't be surprising, especially since Microsoft didn't enhance antispam features in the recent Outlook e-mail client, released last month as part of Office 2003, according to John Pescatore, an analyst at Gartner Inc.
"It's a lot more effective to do [antispam scanning] on the server end, " Pescatore said.
While viruses and worms may be more destructive, spam is the No. 1 problem identified by e-mail users, according to James Kobielus, a senior analyst at 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.
Both Kobielus and Pescatore said that Microsoft hasn't been blamed for spam the way it has been blamed for viruses that maximize security holes in its products. However, as with viruses, Microsoft feels the wrath of customers who are being overwhelmed with spam delivered through its Exchange, Outlook and Hotmail messaging products, driving the company to try to make its messaging products more secure, they said.