New Guidelines, Tools in Spam War

New MSN guidelines will help legitimate high-volume e-mail senders get messages to their Hotmail customers. In addition, MSN will share information with other ISPs to help them cut down on spam originating from their domains. The guidelines, which are contained on a new MSN Postmaster site, illustrate Microsoft’s quandary: the company wants to fight spam to lighten the load on Hotmail’s servers and to improve the Internet experience for PC users, yet does not want to alienate legitimate commercial senders-including MSN advertisers.

Informational Web Site for Senders

Although it contains information for ISPs and end users, the new MSN Postmaster site is mainly geared toward organizations that want to send high volumes of legitimate messages, such as newsletters, notifications of commercial transactions, and advertising messages that a user has opted to receive. Postmaster contains suggestions on how senders can prevent Hotmail’s spam filters from discarding their messages. For example: