Hotmail adds anti-virus protection

[intelliot]

I had thought they already had anti-virus protection, provided by McAfee or something. Apparently not, or they've changed it in some way.

Dear MSN Hotmail Member,

We're excited to announce the free upgrade to your MSN® Hotmail® service starts today with free Anti-virus Protection!

What does this mean for you?

By using MSN Hotmail, you have the only free global e-mail service to both scan and clean incoming and outgoing e-mail for viruses and worms before they can enter your inbox and risk infecting your PC.

That's not all...

In addition, MSN continues to heavily invest in tools and technologies to help protect your e-mail from spam as well as viruses and worms. Today, MSN Hotmail blocks about 95 percent of incoming junk e-mail, or nearly 3 billion pieces of spam daily from ever reaching inboxes — and we have you to thank!

Here's how to reduce SPAM further

Report SPAM as "junk e-mail" to help train and improve our Microsoft-patented SmartScreen technology.

Set your junk e-mail filters in three easy steps:

1. Go to your MSN Hotmail inbox page, click on Options in the upper right-hand corner

2. Select Junk E-mail Protection

3. Set your filter level to Exclusive

This will mean you only receive e-mail from addresses appearing in your contacts, service announcements from MSN Hotmail, and messages they have requested.

Also of note is the mention of "Microsoft-patented SmartScreen technology". Anyone have a clue what this is?

When Gmail finally goes public, will Google be able to compete?

[cvrk3]

here is smartscreen technology:

Developed by Microsoft Research, SmartScreen Technology is based on Bayesian-like machine learning technology that uses a probability-based algorithm to determine whether email is legitimate or spam. The technology learns over time which email messages are legitimate and gets better the more you use it.

To help make SmartScreen Technology more effective, Microsoft tested it on millions of email messages delivered through the company's Hotmail email filters, asking thousands of users to rate the messages as legitimate or spam. Based on the responses, Microsoft put the email messages in a database used to train SmartScreen Technology. Basically, the technology evaluates the contents of each email message and assigns a weighted score to each message according to more than 500,000 characteristics; the higher the score, the higher the probability that the message is spam.

Administrators who roll out the Exchange Intelligent Message Filter can determine where to draw the line between what is and isn't spam and can let individual users set their own ratings system, if desired. Microsoft believes that combining the Exchange Intelligent Message Filter with the client-side antispam features in Outlook 2003 and an intelligent network-edge filter, such as the one in Microsoft Internet Security and Acceleration (ISA) Server 2004 (which includes HTTP spam-filtering capabilities for companies that opt to use Exchange 2003's HTTP capabilities), will provide the most effective means to combat spam.

[antioco2003]

I also thought there was already a kind of antivirus scan in Hotmail, but it seems it was not very useful: last year a friend of mine sent me an email with a "surprise" in the attached file and that antivirus said nothing about it...

Everything they do to improve this scans is good for the users.

[cvrk3]

everyday i get a lot of spam with a message and attachments and notice by hotmail that the attachment is not safe and hence deleted.