Microsoft offers spam technology for Outlook

Microsoft India has announced the availability of the Exchange Intelligent Message Filter. A part of Microsoft’s anti-spam efforts, Intelligent Message Filter technology is available as a free add-on to Exchange Sever 2003. The technology has been designed to provide the latest anti-spam filtering techniques that will help protect corporate and private e-mail users from the growing deluge of spam. The technology is based on a machine-learning approach, where decisions regarding whether e-mail would be considered spam are made by the customers and then incorporated into a feedback loop to train the filter to know what to look for. Customers can download the Exchange Server Intelligent Message Filter from www.microsoft.com/downloads/. “According to the Gartner Group, 35 percent of all business messages received currently is spam. Interestingly, this is likely to go up to 50 percent by 2005. As the spam problem grows, customers are looking for greater protection through technological solutions,” said Saurabh Misra, product marketing manager, Microsoft India. These new e-mail protection and filtering capabilities build on recent security improvements made to Exchange Server 2003 and Outlook 2003 that help to block both malicious content and spam at the gateway and client levels. In addition, support for safe and block sender lists, domain spoofing and a range of other spam-blocking and filtering techniques built into the core Exchange 2003 product allow information technology administrators to focus on maintaining a healthy network, thereby helping to keep end users more productive.