Last Update: Sep 24, 2024 | Published: Jan 07, 2009
Microsoft has released a nice tool that allows us to report any spam e-mail message that has bypassed the built-in Junk Mail filter, the Exchange-side Intelligent Message Filter (IMF) or any other spam filter that you’re using.
After installing the tool, if you choose to send that e-mail for Microsoft for analysis, select the e-mail in Outlook and then click the junk e-mail button on your tool bar. You will see a pop-up window asking whether you want to report the selected e-mail to Microsoft and its affiliates.
When you click “Yes” to confirm that you’d like to report the selected e-mail as junk e-mail, the junk e-mail will be deleted from your Inbox and sent to FrontBridge, a Microsoft company, for analysis to help them improve the effectiveness of our junk e-mail filtering technologies.
The e-mail you’re about to send is submitted for your review, and after a close inspection you can safely send it away.
After a few moments you’ll get a confirmation e-mail:
“Why would I want to send Microsoft anything?” you’re probably asking yourself. The reason to do so would be because by sending your own unique spam samples you will help Microsoft analyze how spammers evolve, what means they employ in order to bypass today’s anti-spam filters, and thus keep the battle between “good and evil” (i.e. anti-spam tools and the spammers that we all hate).
Since the e-mail you’re sending is spam and does not contain any confidential or personal information it’s safe to do so.
I’ve verified this by performing a network capture on SMTP traffic sent by my mail server, and the data it gathered is identical to the e-mail message you see when you submit the spam for review.
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