So I am now a guest blogger on Forefront's Security blog (link in my links section).  Forefront is another division within Microsoft that provides security solutions for Enterprise. This afternoon, they came around and took some video footage of...

The other day a friend of mine sent me a notice on Facebook about how Optimus Prime wanted to send me a message. I didn't bother opening up the email or listen to the message or do whatever it is that this application wanted me to do. However, yesterday...

A colleague alerted me to a spamming tool available on the web at the following web URL: http://verify-email. org It's a page that allows someone to enter in an email address and it will tell you whether or not that email address is live. In essence...

There is a new spam outbreak that hit today, spam in mp3's.  The filenames of the spam varies, and includes some of the following: Emotional ties, for example: dadsong.mp3, oursong.mp3, weddingsong.mp3 Well-known artists and songs, for example: santana...

This post is not spam related, but I'd still like to talk about it. For the longest time, I always used Google maps as my map-interface of choice whenever I wanted to search for a location.  I thought that it had the best user interface. I think...

Here at Microsoft, we quite regularly see people rotating in and out of various divisions.  A new person will join and another person will leave.  Recently we had another anti-spam manager join the group.  Since I've been in the antispam...

As I said earlier, I needed to come up with an authentication mechanism that protected the From: or Sender: address in the message headers. But, I did not want to replace SPF with SenderID. So, I came up with another solution which I call TMA. I would...

Further to my other posts, in addition to handling false positives and processing spam (usually abuse submissions but not always), as a spam fighter we also handle IP blocklist delisting requests. For those of you who have ever run a blocklist, you will...

Following on from my previous post, I thought I'd go into a bit of detail about how we go about creating spam rules. Actually, to be more accurate, I'll go into detail about how I used to create spam rules, as I stopped going through our abuse submission...

I'd now like to post something about the inspiration for this whole series on authentication.  I'm not done with DomainKeys, I still have to post a little bit on DKIM and one other authentication mechanism, and then this series will be done. ...

I was recently thinking about what a person who fights spam (like me) does all day.  In other words, what is a day in the life of a spam analyst like? The question for me is two-fold, because the stuff I do now is quite different than when I first...

Or, to be more precise, it sure looks like they do. In my other post on the publicly available spam tool, I mentioned that I came across a page that allowed people to verify whether or not an email address is actually live.  The question naturally...

This morning at the main Microsoft Campus, I missed my chance to go and hear Hillary Clinton speak. As my American readers will know, and some of my international readers, Hillary Clinton is campaigning for the Democratic nomination to run for president...

Last September, I was transitioned out of my role as a spam analyst to a spam... analyst. Except rather than looking at actual spam, I was doing a lot more analyzing of spam trends. I compiled piles of reports and investigated all of the numerous issues...

Today, Microsoft reported buying a small stake in Facebook worth $240 million, with the deal valuing Facebook at $15 billion.  That is an incredible amount of money for a website that wasn't making money. Of course, we could have argued that when...