Boston–Microsoft announced that 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 seen a three-fold increase in adoption of its Sender ID Framework to 8 million domains worldwide, the software giant said in a statement released at the Authentication and Online Trust Alliance summit on Wednesday.
The company said it detects 3.8 billion fraudulent or spam e-mail messages sent to its Hotmail accounts each day. Another 20 million forged messages are detected every day by Sender ID-enabled domains. And while spam overall has increased 40% in the past 12 months, unsolicited bulk e-mail into Hotmail accounts has dropped by half, with Sender ID accounting for 8% of that drop, the software giant said.
Microsoft developed Sender ID to help it authenticate incoming messages. The framework is freely available to senders. 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.