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Microsoft Spam

Hotmail To Junk Non-Sender-ID Mail 651

Posted by Zonk from the talking-to-yourself dept.
William Robinson writes "If your e-mail does not have a Sender ID, Microsoft wants to junk your message. Somewhere after November, MSN and Hotmail will consider it as spam. Sender ID is a specification for verifying the authenticity of e-mail by ensuring the validity of the server from which the e-mail came. Some experts feel that 'Sender ID' is not an accepted standard and has many shortcomings. Some also feel that Microsoft is trying to strong-arm the industry into the adoption of an incomplete and not accepted standard."
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Hotmail To Junk Non-Sender-ID Mail

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  • This means that I will stop using Hotmail -- go figure!

    • Re:Stop using Hotmail (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Blindman ( 36862 ) on Thursday June 23, 2005 @09:33AM (#12889156) Journal
      Not using hotmail is one thing, but it looks like you might not be able to continue sending e-mail to those with hotmail accounts and don't share your view.
      • Quick check my address book for folks using hotmail... wow, I don't know anybody that stupid. What a relief!
      • I got 50 gmail invites to give away, if you know anyone that needs one... :)

    • Re:Stop using Hotmail (Score:3, Insightful)

      by LWATCDR ( 28044 )
      Time to start handing out those gmail invites.
  • Once people aren't able to receive email from their friends and family, I predict a mass exit to other free email systems.
    • Very true. I really don't see that much e-mail from people on Hotmail anyway. Then again, most of the people I know don't use MSN Messenger either. Obviously people do use it or it wouldn't exist.

      GMail and Yahoo could get a huge boost in their userbase from this *or* MSN could gain users as the spam level drops to near zero.

      Thing is, do I really want to worry about my GMail storage capacity if more people leave Hotmail in droves? ;)
      • Or Hotmail users will start telling people (where everyone is near and dear to each other) so sign up for Hotmail to get their messages.

        It could go both ways. People do this all the time with IM.

    • One little problem: MSN Messenger (Score:5, Insightful)

      by mindaktiviti ( 630001 ) on Thursday June 23, 2005 @09:43AM (#12889266)
      MSN Messenger is the crazy glue that holds together the consumer with the hotmail account. I gave all of my friends gmail accounts which are far superior going by interface alone (and they agree with this). However because they use MSN Messenger they almost always prefer to check their hotmail accounts. What Google needs to do to successfully compete with MSN is to release their own messenger program that's tied in with GMail, only then will it be easier to switch your friends over to another free email service.
    • Microsoft has been using this kind of "embrace and extend" or pure "we implement and damned what everyone says" with their OS for so long, that they have forgotten how to do anything else. They're going to have quite a wakeup call when they try this in a market where they're far from being the main dominant force.

  • Who uses hotmail? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by richieb ( 3277 )
    Does anyone besides spammers use hotmail anymore?

    • Re:Who uses hotmail? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by defkkon ( 712076 ) on Thursday June 23, 2005 @09:34AM (#12889175)
      Unfortunately, yes.

      There are a large number of people who haven't heard of Gmail. These are people who use the Internet to casually browse, and who check their email every other day. Hanging out in the geek community, its hard to believe people don't know their alternatives - but its true!

      Many of these people view email as a very set-in-stone thing. Their friends and family all know their Hotmail address, and all their favourite news letters are delivered there. To them, its a huge pain in the arse to switch addresses. Its almost unthinkable.

      Its these people that will happily put up with whatever Microsoft does to Hotmail, just so they don't have to bother with all this technical nonsense.

    • Does anyone besides spammers use hotmail anymore?

      It has the ability to white list. There's an option to send everything into the bulk folder except for mail coming from someone on your address book. Gmail and Yahoo are pretty good with sorting spam and I use them for personal mail. But for conferences and conventions, I use my hotmail address, and white list the few vendors I want to hear from, and all the others I scanned to get swag get routed right to the bulk folder. Great feature, definitely worth
    • Do you know this little thing called "messenger"? You can use any email adress, but 99% of the people who uses messenger uses hotmail.

      BTW, many of the "hotmail spam" is not "hotmail spam", it's just normal email with the "from" address faked. Also, hotmail has already been using spam filters for a long time.
    • Does anyone besides spammers use hotmail anymore?

      Yes. A lot of ordinary users use it. Examining a database of customer addresses from people who have contacted technical support where I work, I see the following:

      • 13.7% from aol.com
      • 12.7% from yahoo.com
      • 12.3% from hotmail.com
      • 5.1% from msn.com
      • 4.0% from comcast.net
      • 3.1% from sbcglobal.net
      • 2.1% from earthlink.net
      • 1.9% from bellsouth.net
      • 1.6% from cox.net
      • 1.2% from charter.net
      • 1.1% from verizon.net

      Those are all the ones that are above 1%.

  • I can't seem... (Score:3, Funny)

    by fyngyrz ( 762201 ) on Thursday June 23, 2005 @09:24AM (#12889069) Homepage Journal
    ...to verify where this story came from. I'm sorry, it'll have to be rejected.
  • Been wanting to get friends to get off the hotmail bandwagon for years. As an isp, I'd be telling my customers to tell their friends who use hotmail to get on the stick and go to yahoo or gmail before november so their ability to communicate isn't cut off. Please note, SenderID and SPF are both bad ideas. SPF didn't start off that way. In fact it made a strange kind of sense. It was co-opted. The IETF marid working group archives are a great place to go read about how MS really helped screw the pooch. Hotmail and MSN orphaning themselves is probably a good thing in the long run. It's a shame though. And yes, I publish spf records, no I do not make use of them. They are not useful.
    • I agree completely. I haven't been able to shift any of my 50 Gmail invitations since most people are satisfied (read: complacent) with their current webmail, and it's mostly only the cognoscenti who've even heard of Gmail.

      Once I'm able to explain why they've suddenly stopped receiving most of their stuff over at Hotmail, it'll be a lot easier to use up those invites.
      • it'll be a lot easier to use up those invites.

        Unless, of course, hotmail doesn't like gmail's SPF records =)
      • Complacent? Don't talk such rubbish. Gmail doesn't offer me anything worthwhile, so I stick with Yahoo.

        I've had the same Yahoo address since about 1998. It's followed me from ISP to ISP, and country to country. I got sick of constantly changing my email address, be it personal, work or academic, which was my main reason for sticking with Yahoo. On top of that, they forward all email to my personal domain account, and tag spam in the process. I only use the web interface when I'm on the road, although
        • So tell me again, what is the "got to have" feature of Gmail?

          They're not evil.

        • "They also provide 2GB of disk space, which I doubt I'll ever need."

          Do you think Yahoo would have given you those two gigs if gmail hadn't done it first?

          "Maybe you're just gullible and will jump at every piece of marketing foisted in your direction ;)"

          And how much marketing has Google given gmail? Absolutely none.

          • "Do you think Yahoo would have given you those two gigs if gmail hadn't done it first?"

            And that's a reason to switch to Gmail? I think not.

            "And how much marketing has Google given gmail? Absolutely none."

            And what do you call this whole thing with invites? It's viral marketing. It's much more subtle than tradition approaches, and clearly sneaked past your marketing detector.
    • I disagree that SPF records are completely useless. They do pick off about 1% of my incoming spam.

      And if more people would use them, I'd get fewer bogus bounce messages. They're annoying, and it's not that hard to DDoS my mail server by sending out a few zillion messages with known bogus addresses and a forged from address through one's favorite botnet.

      People that configure them to 'soft fail', now that's pretty worthless.

    • Re:Brilliant Move Microsoft. I salute you! (Score:4, Informative)

      by jon3k ( 691256 ) on Thursday June 23, 2005 @10:06AM (#12889510)
      And yes, I publish spf records, no I do not make use of them. They are not useful.

      Anyone who makes statements like this truely doesn't understand the purpose of SPF.

      Its "sender policy framework" - not "spam prevention framework."

      SPF isn't designed to stop spam, why is that so hard to understand? Its just used to make sure that whatever domain an email was sent from, that the envelope sender matches. Thats it. End of discussion.

      This doesn't stop spam, but it makes sure that no one can forge an address from your domain, unless it wasr eally sent from your domain.

      If everyone respected it, your users wouldn't be getting any more phishing scams from "someuser@paypal.com" - or "attn@bankofamerica.com".

      You're going to sit there and tell me that its "not useful" ? Get your head out of the sand.

  • Yes but (Score:5, Funny)

    by Colin Smith ( 2679 ) on Thursday June 23, 2005 @09:25AM (#12889075)

    If we all buy Microsoft email servers it will be a standard, won't it.

  • Now that I've found Mailinator there's no reason for me to maintain a Hotmail account.

  • Only if other ISPs go along with it (Score:5, Insightful)

    by matt_morgan ( 220418 ) <matt&cncrt,net> on Thursday June 23, 2005 @09:26AM (#12889088) Homepage
    This is a trial baloon. If some other big ISPs decide to go along with this, I can see it happening. If nobody else goes along with it, they won't enforce it. No need to panic here.
    • The thing to do would be for everybody who does not want an MS dominated email infrastructure to reject all email from servers that publish SPF records.

      Too bad nobody has balls to do that though. MS will own another vital infrastructure by throwing their weight around and shoving down everybodies throats. The rest of the industry will bend over and take it like usual.

      It's kind of a abused spouse syndrome. They keep getting slapped around and they are too afraid to leave.
    • Plenty of big ISPs already go along. Out of the big 4, AOL, Earthlink & MSN have SPF records; only Yahoo is sitting out due to DomainKeys. Other SPFs include Gmail, RR, and Adelphia. Another interesting note: top spam sources MCI, SBC, Comcast, and XO do NOT publish SPF.

      As an anti-spammer, I really hope that Hotmail has the cojones to follow through with this. It would be a huge wake-up call to lots of ISPs if millions of emails suddenly get rejected.

      BTW, what's the correct SMTP error code to put on a

  • Big Surprise (Score:5, Interesting)

    by alvinrod ( 889928 ) on Thursday June 23, 2005 @09:26AM (#12889093)
    From the article:

    "We think Microsoft is trying to strong-arm the industry into the adoption of an incomplete and not accepted standard".

    Gee, when's the last time this happened?

    Personally, it will only be a matter of time until the spammers figure out a way to get around this. End result: a serious pain for everyone that accomplishes nothing.

    • Re:Big Surprise (Score:3, Insightful)

      by schon ( 31600 )
      it will only be a matter of time until the spammers figure out a way to get around this

      A way around what, exactly?

      Sender-id is *not* an anti-spam measure. It will do absolutely nothing (as in _NOTHING_ ) to stop spam.

      All it does is say "this email comes from a server that the owner of the domain says is OK."

      How, exactly, does that stop a spammer from sending spam?
    • when's the last time that microsoft did such a thing, turned around a year later saying it was hopelessly broken, and _then_ offered their new and improved overlord mail control system?

  • Do as I say, not as I do (Score:4, Interesting)

    by asc4 ( 413110 ) on Thursday June 23, 2005 @09:26AM (#12889095) Homepage
    Despite the fact that Hotmail will only be using SPF v2 records to do the filtering, it seems that Hotmail themselves haven't bothered yet to publish one: http://www.dnsstuff.com/tools/lookup.ch?type=TXT&n ame=hotmail.com [dnsstuff.com]

  • ... well, spammers won't change, so all this will do is convince those who use Hotmail because they've had an account forever or who don't know better... to look for greener pastures... like Yahoo Mail, or perhaps Gmail (if they can get an invite, which isn't hard)...

    (or did they remove the invite system yet? hehe)

    ===

    We all know what needs to be done about the spammers... *cocking shotgun* ... I'm not the one to do it, I just enjoy imagining the sound of a cocking shotgun, why are you looking at me?

  • strongarm what? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by tomstdenis ( 446163 )
    I don't know ANYONE who uses hotmail for more than a throwaway address. So let them have their little party. Who cares?

    Tom

    • Re:strongarm what? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by hab136 ( 30884 )
      I don't know ANYONE who uses hotmail for more than a throwaway address. So let them have their little party. Who cares?

      And Mailinator [mailinator.com] does a better job at throwaway addresses anyways.

    • Re:strongarm what? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Launch ( 66938 ) on Thursday June 23, 2005 @09:51AM (#12889346)
      I've been using hotmail for years, way before MS ever owned hotmail. At the time I signed up for hotmail everyone was chilling with their @netcom or any simular isp branded e-mail. If you're anything like me you've gone through a couple ISPs over the last 10 years. You also are probably aware what a PITA it is to change e-mail addresses. That's why I've stuck with hotmail all theses years.

      I have a g-mail account, it's pretty awesome and probably better then hotmail... but one feature that hotmail has over other web-based e-mails is easy integration with a fat-client e-mail system.

      I've yet to see a web-based client that can handle my e-mail needs... Even MS's OWA isn't a replacement for outlook.

      I know there will be a flurry of flames about using outlook, etc etc... but the bottom line is that nothing integrates better for my needs, my palm, my blackberry, my non-work hotmail, owa, etc.

      My basic point is that there are at least some merrits to using hotmail.

  • this one could be a problem for casual users (Score:5, Interesting)

    by yagu ( 721525 ) <yayagu.gmail@com> on Thursday June 23, 2005 @09:29AM (#12889125) Journal

    I've had my fun with e-mail spoofing, but now that e-mail is everywhere and used by almost everyone it's probably close to "time" for mechanisms and protocols that make e-mail more trustworthy and difficult to spoof (of course there are always going to be exceptions). But Microsoft contributes little by doing their own end run on the industry.

    From the article:

    Microsoft's unilateral move may hurt Internet users, he said. "Sender ID isn't widely deployed, meaning that average users are now at risk for having their legitimate e-mail tagged as spam when they send messages to Hotmail users."

    Experts say one of the problems with Sender ID is that it doesn't work with e-mail forwarding services. The basic premise of Sender ID is to check if an e-mail that claims to be coming from a certain Internet domain is really being sent from the e-mail servers associated with that domain.

    This opens up a huge can of worms... I don't quite get why Microsoft doesn't learn from past mistake^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hefforts. The unwashed masses (read, typical computer users) already deal daily with mind numbing quirky computer behavior (or lack of). For example (and I know I'm beating a dead horse (checkmate!)), Microsoft's morphing menus with chevrons, Microsoft's dumping of random files in random directories to mold their vision of a magical world (how many have been burned by the unexpected "thumbs.db" file in their picture folders?), and bizarro network settings (ever wonder why seemingly every computer in a home network gets configured with bridging?) -- these are just a few examples of things that confuse and irritate typical users, but the ripple effect is into the "support" community (that's us).

    Rolling out this semi-baked quasi-standard e-mail device could wreak havoc with the e-mail users. I'm hoping whatever they do it's configured by default to not reject non-ID'ed e-mails. Regardless, unless and until there's a stronger and more mature standard, this one's trouble.

  • It's only fair (Score:5, Funny)

    by portwojc ( 201398 ) on Thursday June 23, 2005 @09:30AM (#12889130) Homepage
    Hotmail and MSN will flag as potential spam those messages that do not have the tag to verify the sender

    It's only fair cause we already tag mail from those domains as potential spam.

  • GMail? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Andrewkov ( 140579 ) on Thursday June 23, 2005 @09:31AM (#12889146)
    I wonder if G-Mail will be out of Beta by then? That could be an interesting opertunity for Google.

    Anyway, G-Mail is already so superior to Hotmail, in both the interface and spam blocking, I can't imagine why people still use Hotmail.
    • Out of beta? Hahahaha. Google has completely crushed the meaning of the word 'beta'.
    • does anyone know if Gmail or Yahoo currently support SenderID? Will they continue to be able to send to Hotmail users??
  • 1. Microsoft (virri vulnerabilities) causes SPAM. Slashdot outraged.
    2. Microsoft fights SPAM. Slashdot equally outraged.
    Conclusion: Microsoft is always evil no matter what they do.

    I bet that if it was a story about Gmail then it would be a great idea, becasue Google never does evil.

    • Re:Damn if they don't, damn if they do... (Score:5, Informative)

      by I confirm I'm not a ( 720413 ) on Thursday June 23, 2005 @09:46AM (#12889294) Journal

      2. Microsoft fights SPAM. Slashdot equally outraged.
      Conclusion: Microsoft is always evil no matter what they do.

      Nope, Microsoft isn't fighting SPAM - if they were they'd be cooperating with the "rest of the Internet", instead of promoting their own proprietary scheme - SenderID - that's so un-open as to provoke this comment [apache.org] from the Apache Software Foundation:

      We believe the current license is generally incompatible with open source, contrary to the practice of open Internet standards, and specifically incompatible with the Apache License 2.0. Therefore, we will not implement or deploy Sender ID under the current license terms.

      Various other disparate organisations have raised similar concerns, eventually resulting in the IETF ditching Microsoft's proposal.

      Microsoft, at least in this case, weren't interested in a working solution; they were interested in a Microsoft-friendly, FLOSS-hostile solution. Which is daft, given the open-source nature of most Internet technologies.

  • So? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Tim C ( 15259 ) on Thursday June 23, 2005 @09:34AM (#12889177)
    Every time RBLs are discussed here, there are a great many comments (quite a lot at +5) to the effect of "they're my mail servers, I can drop any mail I want to" from those defending their use of the various RBLs.

    How is this any different?

  • Home workers (Score:5, Interesting)

    by nagora ( 177841 ) on Thursday June 23, 2005 @09:36AM (#12889196)
    So, how does this work for companies with large numbers of home-workers who are happily sending main aout throught their home ISP's with "spoofed" headers claiming, quite correctly, that their email comes from the company?

    Frankly, Sender-ID is a dead duck for many reasons but the biggest is simply that many legitimate emails come from random IPs while plenty of spam comes from infected "authorised" machines.

    This is just another, on a thirty-year-long run, example of the fact that when it comes to IT, MS is clueless. Business methods and the law are their fortes.

    TWW

    • Re:Home workers (Score:3, Informative)

      by Da w00t ( 1789 ) *
      In this case, you have your employee connect to your mail server over ssl, usually port 589. Require SMTP auth. Require SSL.

      Also, require SRS. Sender Recipient Signing is the shit. I used to get metric assloads of joe-job spam at 4 (out of 12) of the domains I own, and now the only joe-job bounces I get are delayed bounces that aren't really bounces at all. SRS proves that the "bounce" you're getting actually came from your server. It's great.

      Rejecting mail (Hmm.... sound like Earthlink?) based

      • Re:Home workers (Score:4, Informative)

        by TheRaven64 ( 641858 ) on Thursday June 23, 2005 @10:20AM (#12889666) Journal
        For anyone interested, there is a tutorial for setting up Sendmail for authenticated relaying here [pingwales.co.uk], including a sendmail configuration file that can be used. While it is targetted at OpenBSD, most of it can easily be translated to other *NIX flavours (file locations are about the only things that need changing). The next article in the series (spam filtering) is a bit more OpenBSD specific, since it uses OpenBSD's spamd tar pit, although this could probably be persuaded to work with NetBSD and FreeBSD, since they both have working pf ports.

      • Re:Home workers (Score:4, Informative)

        by Szaman2 ( 716894 ) on Thursday June 23, 2005 @10:35AM (#12889883) Homepage

        In this case, you have your employee connect to your mail server over ssl, usually port 589. Require SMTP auth. Require SSL

        Been there, done that. I had to drop this because 90% of my employees use Outlook 2002. And SSL support is broken in Office XP. You need to install office service pack 3 or 4 to actually have it working. That of course is a 20+ MB download, which requires you to have a Office CD on you. My users usually have laptops, and they work in the field where they often only have dialup access. And we don't give them Office CD's - laptops get serviced in the office.

        Needless to say, once we switched SSL on no one could send out emails anymore, we had to send every single person a copy of Office XP cd, and istruct them how to do the upgrade.

        And that's just the tip of the icebearg. Most of my users use Norton Antivirus which by default scans outgoing emails. It does it by proxying them. So if you have outgoing email scanning enabled, you won't be able to send emails with Outlook with SSL enabled - it's as simple as that.

        Consequently, we decided to drop the whole SSL idea. It was just to much hassle for our technologically challanged employees.

    • Re:Home workers (Score:3, Insightful)

      by afidel ( 530433 )
      Get them a VPN, get them a corporate email account and some way (webmail, RPC over HTTP, etc) to send email, etc. Sorry but relying on known broken mechanisms for your business isn't my problem. Sure I believe Sender-ID is dead, but the idea that they embraced and extended (SPF) is not. Many ISP's already either block messages or give them extremely high spam scores based on the lack of an SPF record, this isn't that new. SPF is about raising the bar for spammers, and hopefully we can eventually figure out

  • Who will use hotmail? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by blue_adept ( 40915 ) on Thursday June 23, 2005 @09:41AM (#12889236)
    Hotmail has been on a steady decline every since Microsoft bought it. Just compare it to gmail or yahoo (which you CAN use with almost ANY useragent, even ones that don't support javascript). Most other webmail providers are now more rhobust, with a cleaner interface.

    Not to mention you don't have to worry about them trashing your Non-Sender-ID emails.
    • Not even as long ago as when MS bought Hotmail - Hotmail has gone down in the last few months - buggy switching between accounts (at least on Firefox anyway - although it could possibly be a GAIM or Trillian problem from the places I've noticed the bug), changing the method of navigating between mails to javascript instead of a simple href (so you can't for example just middle-click on each email to open a tab with it in, at least by default in Firefox - maybe an extension can fix this), more timeouts on pa

  • Good for the gander... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by pla ( 258480 ) on Thursday June 23, 2005 @09:41AM (#12889241) Journal
    Some also feel that Microsoft is trying to strong-arm the industry into the adoption of an incomplete and not accepted standard.

    ...And some (like me) feel that anything from Hotmail most likely counts as spam anyway, and have the entire domain in my filter list.

    So Hotmail can't get mail from me anymore. Boo-frickin'-hoo. What next, AOL doing the same? Then perhaps Yahoo?

    Sorry, but until a major provider that matters picks an anti-spam tech, they will accomplish nothing more than effectively depriving their customers from using email.

  • That's good news... for Gmail (Score:5, Funny)

    by Wolfger ( 96957 ) on Thursday June 23, 2005 @09:42AM (#12889252)
    One invite already gone, 49 to go. :-)

  • Wikipedian? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by mnemonic_ ( 164550 ) <jamec@u m i ch.edu> on Thursday June 23, 2005 @09:44AM (#12889270) Homepage Journal
    Some experts feel that 'Sender ID' is not an accepted standard and has many shortcomings. Some also feel that Microsoft is trying to strong-arm the industry into the adoption of an incomplete and not accepted standard.

    Let me guess, the story submitter is a Wikipedian? Let's try to avoid weasel terms [wikipedia.org]. Unlike Wikipedia, Slashdot has no neutrality obligation, but if you want to attack something then be clear about it. Don't be redundant either; if a web standard is not accepted by the W3C (the only real web standards authority), then it is not a standard. Let me show you:

    Opponents believe the non-standard 'Sender ID' is flawed, and that Microsoft is trying to force the industry to adopting an incomplete protocol.

    See? It's shorter, unequivocal while maintaining all previous meaning. Weasel words do not sanitize an opinion in any way.

    -- User:Xmnemonic [wikipedia.org]

    • Re:Wikipedian? (Score:3, Informative)

      by TheRaven64 ( 641858 )
      if a web standard is not accepted by the W3C (the only real web standards authority), then it is not a standard

      This isn't a Web standard, it's an Internet standard (or, rather, non-standard). The correct standards body would be the IETF, not the W3C.

  • Some also feel that Microsoft is trying to strong-arm the industry into the adoption of an incomplete and not accepted standard.

    You mean Hotmail?

    (Of course, that statement in general is an excellent short description of Microsoft's strategy to maintain dominance. Maybe add to it "that is proprietarily controlled by Microsoft" at the end, since that's what they'd really prefer. When you're the monopolist or near-monopolist, industry standards that are open are very inconvenient for you.)

    -Rob

  • Microsoft will most likely block the emails, and send an email to the user saying "This looks legitimate, but we can't deliver it because the sender's company is not using Sender-ID. You may contact them here to show that you would like to see them implement it".
    This will get the ball off their court, as they will get regular users thinking that this is a good thing and we should contact the other company to tell them to implement it, thereby slowly penetrating the market with the bull they call an innov
  • So what they're saying is that, come November, the Hotmail spam filter might actually start to catch some spam?
  • If you are are hotmail user, just send me a request at mshiltonj at gmail dot com and I will send you an invitation to use the gmail service. Free. First come, first serve. Hotmail users only!

  • Thank you Microsoft (Score:3, Insightful)

    by hacker ( 14635 ) <hacker@gnu-designs.com> on Thursday June 23, 2005 @09:48AM (#12889316)

    Well that cinches it... now I can block Hotmail permanently, since they are refusing to deliver mail from my legitimate MX.

    There are lots of alternatives to using Hotmail... Gmail, Yahoo mail, and others. Use them instead.

    99% of the mail coming from Hotmail is spam anyway, so this gives me more reason to stop the spam coming from Hotmail to my users. I'm protecting my users by blocking Hotmail.

    I for one am tired of Microsoft claiming to embrace standards by strangling off the air from the lungs of the real standards bodies. When Sender-ID is a widespread industry standard (i.e. in every MTA without patching), THEN I'll begin working with Microsoft to stop spam.

    I will not be strong-armed by Microsoft, ever, especially where it affects MY server and MY users and MY mail. Period.

    Until their OS stops being a malware replication engine, their services stop harboring spammers by the millions, and their patches actually FIX problems instead of CAUSING them, they can go pound sand.

  • Don't underestimate MSN (Score:3, Interesting)

    by WormholeFiend ( 674934 ) on Thursday June 23, 2005 @09:53AM (#12889366)
    a lot of people use MSN... as much as I don't like it, I have to use it to keep in touch with most of my non-tech-savvy friends, who won't use any other IM...

    And to use MSN you need a hotmail account.

    Google still has a lot of public awareness ground to cover IMO... when I give out my gmail address, some people ask me "so you work for the government?"

  • SPF spec author says: SenderID is crap (Score:5, Informative)

    by wayne ( 1579 ) <wayne@schlitt.net> on Thursday June 23, 2005 @10:36AM (#12889911) Homepage Journal
    I am the current editor of the SPF specification [ietf.org]. Both Meng Wong and I agree that SenderID is a horrible idea, that it doesn't work as well as SPF, and that SenderID is abusing current SPF records in incompatible way.

    While both SPF and SenderID break on many forwarded emails, SenderID breaks on many mailing lists also. Moreover, one of the most promising solutions to the SPF forwarding problem (a specialized DNS server, as outlined in section 9.3.1.2 in the SPF spec) breaks when SenderID uses it.

    So, SenderID is a patented system that is incompatible with many of the F/OSS mail servers that currently dominate the internet, it doesn't work as well as other technologies, it damages the use of SPF, and outside of MS, it is being used by almost no one.

    If this was just a matter of hotmail and MSN hurting themselves, then I wouldn't have any problems with it. However, this appears to be a case of Microsoft working hard to hurt the entire internet email environment.

  • No USE Hotmail (Score:3, Funny)

    by jav1231 ( 539129 ) on Thursday June 23, 2005 @10:57AM (#12890238)
    I use 2 Hotmail accounts. The first gets NOTHING but spam. In fact, I have a rule setup that just deletes it all. I really should change that, but the idea that all that spam is impacting their server gives me a warm feeling. The other, I use for anything that I need to fill out. If it happens to generate spam or can I use that.
    Look, I don't mind M$ doing stupid things like this. How big of a share does Hotmail have? Probably not much. The more people have problems with it the more they'll stay away. Even better! I live for the day M$ is reduced to an applications company. Where Windows no longer exists. Where THEY are dependent upon licenses from vendors. Total destruction would be nice but I can live with "just another player."
    I'm convinced M$ is inherently evil. Like murder, molestation, Satan, Eminem. The world would be much better off without it.

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