Live From AOTA 07: Microsoft Says Sender ID Helps Vs. Spam

Microsoft Wednesday announced its e-mail authentication scheme has helped it make a serious dent in the amount of spam reaching Windows Live Hotmail accounts.

In the last year, Microsoft has also it has seen a three-fold increase in adoption of its Sender ID Framework to 8 million domains worldwide, the Redmond WA software giant said in a statement released at the Authentication and Online Trust Alliance conference in Boston.

The company also said it detects 3.8 billion fraudulent or spam e-mail messages sent to its Hotmail accounts each day. The company added that 20 million forged messages are detected every day by Sender ID–enabled domains.

Also, while spam overall has increased 40% in the last 12 months, unsolicited bulk e-mail into Hotmail accounts has dropped by half and Sender ID has accounted for 8% of that drop, the software giant said.

Microsoft developed Sender ID to help it authenticate incoming massages. The framework is freely available to senders.

Under the scheme, Microsoft checks the address of a sending server against a list of addresses the domain owner has published that are authorized to send e-mail on the domain owner’s behalf. If the domain owner has implemented Sender ID and the sending server’s address is not on the domain owner’s list, the message is suspect.

According to the Microsoft, 43% of legitimate e-mail coming into Hotmail accounts is Sender ID-compliant and 90% of e-mail marketers have adopted the standard.