Hotmail

Today, people on Windows Live Hotmail are seeing less spam in their inboxes than ever before. We're committed to providing folks with advanced inbox protection technology and will continue to fight junk mail and phishing scams.

A few highlights of our efforts include:

You can delete and report junk mail to Hotmail in a single easy click. Doing so helps us to predict where spam is likely to come from so that we can do our best to block it before it gets to your inbox. The same goes for phishing scams. One or two easy clicks and you've not only deleted and reported a potential phishing scam, you've enhanced our ability to anticipate and fight fraud.

Community feedback – the aggregate of all of these helpful clicks – doesn't just enable Hotmail to be more effective in fighting spam and phishing scams. Other Microsoft products like Internet Explorer 7 and 8, Exchange Server, and Microsoft Office Outlook use similar anti-spam and reputation technology that is improved by community feedback from people using Hotmail.

We use an array Microsoft technology to fight spammers and phishers. Microsoft's SmartScreen technology is designed to provide the latest anti-spam filtering innovations for Hotmail. We also leverage the Sender ID framework, an e-mail authentication technology protocol that helps address the problem of spoofing and phishing by verifying the domain sending the e-mail is authorized to do so.

Hotmail gives people a number of tools they can use to further protect their inboxes, including simple ways to tell Hotmail which senders (people who send them e-mail) are safe or unsafe, so that they can explicitly block e-mails from senders they don't want e-mailing them. Hotmail also enables you to decide whether or not to download images you've received in e-mail from unknown senders given that spammers can use images to do bad stuff like locate active e-mail addresses and embed harmful code. One of the best defenses is to prevent pictures from downloading until you've had a chance to review the message - Hotmail gives you the control to do exactly that. (Read more security tips from Microsoft.)

Microsoft works closely with publishers of legitimate e-mail to help them better understand how to improve their e-mail deliverability by following sender best practices. We also enable publishers to give people using Hotmail the opportunity to "unsubscribe" from newsletters they previously subscribed to but now no longer want with a convenient single click.

We work with other large web-mail providers to identify and stop spammers quickly. Together, we help each other minimize spam in your inbox.