Microsoft chairman and chief software architect Bill
Gates used his keynote address yesterday at the annual Comdex 2003
trade show in Las Vegas to announce plans to make the company's
Exchange e-mail server better at stopping spam.
The company is adding heuristics-based antispam capabilities to
future releases of Exchange Server 2003, which will enable Exchange
Server to stop spam e-mail messages before they reach users' e-mail
inboxes.
Heuristics antispam technology analyses 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 the same messages which
have already been received.
The new antispam feature, which Microsoft is calling the
Exchange Intelligent Message Filter (IMF), uses heuristics
technology developed internally.
Information from Microsoft's Hotmail free Web-based e-mail
service will be used to keep the Microsoft heuristics database up
to date on the most recent spam trends.
The latest features will be offered to customers who sign on to
Microsoft's Software Assurance program, which streamlines licensing
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 is not saying when the features will be
generally available to Exchange customers.
Paul Roberts writes for IDG News Service