Commentary

Just an Online Minute... Microsoft Joins Spam Battle

Microsoft Corp. today said it will be assembling a team of about 20 people from across the company to fight spam. The team will grow in numbers, according to Kevin Doerr, who will lead the initiative, and use legislation, technology and industry collaboration to stop spam from destroying the email medium altogether.

In April, Microsoft partnered with AOL and Yahoo to block unidentified emails and already blocks more than 2.4 billion spam messages daily and has filed 15 lawsuits against individuals and businesses that it claims are responsible for flooding its Internet service arm with more than 2 billion spam messages daily.

Today's announcement follows an opinion piece titled "Why I Hate Spam" that Bill Gates published in the Wall Street Journal last week. "Congress could help by providing a strong incentive for businesses to adopt best email practices. Our proposal is to create a regulatory 'safe harbor' status for senders who comply with email guidelines confirmed by an FTC-approved self-regulatory body," Gates wrote.

While I wholeheartedly support any and all initiatives to free my inbox from get-rich-quick offers and anatomy enhancement pitches, I don't quite understand what Microsoft is hoping to accomplish here, other than get its name in the press again.

What's interesting to me is that Microsoft has long argued that overly restrictive regulation could hurt companies that want to communicate with their customers via email, but in the column, Gates endorsed legislation that would require unsolicited email senders to identify their messages with "ADV:" in the subject line.

I'm sorry to disagree with the omnipotent Mr. Gates, but I can't think of anything more restrictive than the "ADV:" tag requirements, which are going to do absolutely NOTHING to stop spam and instead truly hurt legitimate email marketers (and yes, there are plenty of those.) Spammers don't care about anything other than making money. Not the law, not ethics, not best practices or anything remotely relating to good business. Which is why I have to say again (and I promise this will be the last time I rant on this topic for a while,) that the only thing that will put an end to spam is a paradigm shift where email goes from "accept all messages unless blocked" to "block all messages until sender is proven legitimate." Until that happens, best of luck to Microsoft, but I'm not holding my breath.

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