Microsoft has launched the largest ever legal assault on companies and individuals accused of sending 鈥渟pam鈥� email.
The software giant disclosed details of 15 law suits on Tuesday against defendants in the US and the UK accused of deluging the company鈥檚 customers鈥� with unrequested advertising for pornography, get rich quick schemes, Viagra and other products.
Microsoft has brought 12 legal suits in Washington, one in California and two in the UK. But while anti-spam campaigners welcomed the move, some observers interpreted it an attempt to make Microsoft鈥檚 online email services, which include Hotmail and MSN, appear more attractive to potential customers.
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Other email service providers, including AOL, Earthlink and Yahoo!, have all launched law suits against alleged spammers in recent months.
鈥淥bviously this is doing us all a favour, but it鈥檚 also quite a lot of marketing,鈥� says Steve Linford, head of Spamhaus, a spam fighting organisation based in the UK. 鈥淚t鈥檚 saying come to us, because we鈥檒l get the spammers out of your in-box.鈥�
Multi-pronged
Microsoft maintains, however, that it is committed to tackling spam in a number of ways. 鈥淚t鈥檚 a multi-pronged attack and enforcement is just one of our strategies,鈥� says Matt Whitingham, group marketing manager for MSN UK. 鈥淚t鈥檚 part of a wider initiative covering technology, self regulation and legislation,鈥� he told 快猫短视频.
But, while Microsoft may be keen to stomp on some forms of spam, it does not wish to see an end to all forms of unsolicited email. The company wants to preserve the ability of legitimate companies to market their products in this way.
Whitingham says the messages focussed on by the current Microsoft legal action were sent by 鈥渦nscrupulous鈥� companies 鈥� 鈥渋t鈥檚 not spam sent by legitimate big brand organisations鈥�.
Spam filter
Some, including Linford, worry that the approach may simply increase levels of legitimate, but still unwanted, spam. David Sorkin an expert on internet law at the John Marshall Law School in Chicago, US, told the New York Times: 鈥淎s we clean up the spam, we will leave the door open to more and more nonfraudulent spam, and that will be much worse.鈥�
Microsoft鈥檚 plans are also likely to see the company push its own consumer spam filtering software, which would compete with other commercial products.
The latest version of Microsoft鈥檚 Office suite will include some spam filtering technology and even more advanced filters, perhaps based on complex statistical filtering methods, are expected with the next version of the Windows operating system.
The US defendants in Microsoft鈥檚 suits are accused of sending fraudulent bulk email to Microsoft鈥檚 customers. Defendants in the UK are accused of harvesting email addresses for future use by spammers. This is done by randomly generating email addresses ending in @hotmail.com or @msn.com and testing whether or not these are rejected as non-existent by email servers.