Hotmail will start fighting spam — starting with legitimate mail
Microsoft pushes spam-filtering technology
If your e-mail does not have a Sender ID, Microsoft wants to junk your message.
This is nice. Starting this November, Microsoft will start marking legitimate mail as spam if the sender refuses to adopt their Sender ID technology. I don’t know whether my mails are tagged with the right information and frankly I don’t care. But as I have 50 gmail invites left I figure that I’ll provide them here, 5 at a time, to enable 50 people to migrate from hotmail to a free service that doesn’t trash innocent mails from your friends. Yes, I can be trusted that I won’t do anything nasty with the addresses that are being created from these invites. And as far as spam fighting is concerned: my public OpenPGP key is 0x07682735, what’s yours? Eh, don’t have one? Be ashamed of thyself…
Oh come on, Sender ID is based on SPF records and you really oughta have one of those for your domain.
Oh, and your comments are broken. The “How much is…” question doesn’t say it’s required, and if you don’t fill it in you get a weird error about comments being closed.
First of all, the error with comments needs work, but I figured that asking a question is a better option than captchas when it comes to preventing comment spam while remaining usable to the visually disabled. But marking it as required is a good point.
Now about spf: while it is true that if everyone uses it it may help, I doubt whether the timing is right when less than 1 in 70 domains uses spf records. Gradual introduction and standardization of techniques like this one is good, but bluntly start burdening end users with a move that obviously has a great deal of political motivation behind it most certainly isn’t. That is, if the whole thing has a significant impact on spam to begin with.
By the way, I know that this isn’t exactly the most rationally motivated post I made, I guess it’s the hot weather that has gotten to my head… though I’d still frown upon this whole mandatory sender ID thing.