Junk mail evades Hotmail filter

It's hard to get rid of unwanted staff@

By John Leyden • Get more from this author

Posted in Music and Media, 3rd October 2002 16:39 GMT

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Hotmail users are irked at a loophole in Hotmail's anti-spam technology which makes them unable to block messages from certain senders.

Spammers sending unsolicited emails from staff@somwhere.something are sailing past defences because addresses prefixed by staff can't be blocked by Hotmail's filter, Reg readers inform us.

It's a minor irritation, for now, and not something addressed by Hotmail's partnership with spam filtering specialist Brightmail.

Brightmail is yet to respond to our requests for comment on the issue but in the interests of fairness we note that its partnership with Hotmail aims to reduce - not eliminate - the amount of spam received by Hotmail users receive. This is reaching epidemic proportions.

According to Microsoft, there are 110m Hotmail users worldwide, which must mean billions of spams sent each day to Hotmail accounts. Here is an article from last year which suggests some reasons why Hotmail users get so much spam. ®