November 23, 2008 by James Oliver
According to spamhaus.org, a site that monitors and tracks unwanted commercial e-mail, Microsoft is the fifth worst ISP for spam, and rising steadily. Microsoft first appeared on the top-10 list maintained by the site at number nine earlier in the month, though they have steadily risen, or should I say fallen, over the last few weeks.
The site claims that users of livefilestore.com and live.com are being redirected to sites which sell porn, fake pharmaceuticals, promote scams, etc., with alarming frequency.
Apparently Microsoft properties are particularly popular with spammers due to the company’s sheer size. Spammers know that the groups that exist to combat spam are going to be unwilling to incur Microsft’s wrath by ‘blocking’ their properties, i.e., recommending that users do not visit those sites or use those services.
Yahoo were on the list until this week but have since disappeared from the site after taking steps to cull or shut down the domains that were causing problems. There is some annoyance at Microsoft’s perceived unwillingness to take similar steps to combat the problem.
“It should not be difficult for a company with Microsoft’s resources to identify and mitigate that abuse in-house without any external input, but so far this has not happened,” said Spamhaus’s chief information officer, Richard Cox.
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