Last year Microsoft acquired the hosted (or managed) email security service provider FrontBridge. For some time, we've been saying that there's an interesting competitive advantage enjoyed by FrontBridge and other services providers, such as Postini, MessageLabs, and BlackSpider.
Companies that offer a service to a large number of customers get to see a lot of spam and other unwanted email. This is very useful to spot new types of spam campaigns, and to spot them quickly. As spammers shift to a botnet model, spam campaigns are hitting harder -- sending more messages over a shorter period of time. The quicker a spam control solution can notice a new campaign and block it, the less spam users receive.
Microsoft says that "92% of all email received at microsoft.com is spam," so the FrontBridge team is now receiving an enormous corpus of new spam, which should help them to be more reactive to new spam campaigns.
Interestingly, Microsoft claims that it's also extracting reputation data from spam sent to hotmail.com and msn.com, but as far as we know this is still protected by BrightMail technology.
... Richi Jennings, with thanks to Microsoft's Andy Lees
[edited for clarity June 15 7.55am PDT]
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The Daily Incite – June 15, 2006
June 15, 2006 Good Morning: Today lets talk about compliance because I continue to see vendors pulling the same stunts over and over again. First, I want to address what is compliance, since if you pay attention to a NWW review it