IronPort, Microsoft team on antispam effort for Hotmail, MSN users

Computerworld - Microsoft Corp. has teamed up with messaging appliance vendor IronPort Systems Inc. to bring new antispam capabilities for users of Microsoft's Hotmail.com and MSN.com e-mail services.
Under the deal announced today (download PDF), Microsoft will allow vendors that are registered and preapproved in IronPort's Bonded Sender program to send e-mails to Hotmail and MSN users without the messages being subject to normal Hotmail or MSN antispam controls. Recipients can then choose to receive e-mails from the bonded senders by opting in for the commercial e-mail.
Bonded Sender is an IronPort program that identifies legitimate commercial e-mail senders that have put up a financial bond and adhere to rules about how they will send mail to recipients, according to Tom Gillis, a senior vice president of worldwide marketing at San Bruno, Calif.-based IronPort. The problem the program addresses, he said, is that spam filters have been getting more aggressive, often leading to legitimate commercial e-mail being deleted when it is falsely identified as spam. The bonds range from $500 to tens of thousands of dollars and are subject to seizure if the senders violate program rules. Senders pay to make the service work, so there is no cost to Microsoft or e-mail recipients.
Under the deal, Microsoft will allow commercial e-mails to flow from the approximately 50 bonded senders in the program so far to its 170 million active Hotmail and 2 million MSN users who choose to opt in and receive the e-mail. That gives the senders a clear path to e-mail boxes to deliver their messages.
Search engine vendor Google Inc. is one of the existing bonded senders. It uses the service to help deliver its newsletters and other e-mails that recipients sign up for without fearing that the mail will be deleted by spam filters, Gillis said.
Microsoft is the latest of about 28,000 Internet service providers, universities and corporations that have signed up to receive bonded sender mail, he said. Microsoft has been testing the program for about five months. "They wanted to make sure that it was rock-solid," Gillis said. "We've been able to pass that test."
George Webb, group business manager of antispam technology and strategy at Microsoft, said IronPort's bonded sender program essentially creates a third-party safe-mail list that can help e-mail recipients get the messages they want. "We think that's a promising development," Webb said.
E-mail senders who want to join the bonded sender program must undergo a certification process by Truste, a San Francisco-based privacy group that has certified some 1,300 Web sites