Microsoft ranks 5th on inglorious spam-friendly ISP list

Microsoft is the world’s fifth worst spam service ISP, according to a new list compiled by Spamhaus.org.

The software giant’s high ranking in the unsolicited email game might, it would be fair to surmise, cause a few blushes among Redmond wonks.

Not so, according to Spamhaus chief information officer Richard Cox, who claims to have repeatedly notified MS about its rise up the inglorious list, to no avail.

He told the Washington Post that the company’s live.com and livefilestore.com web properties are being abused by swindlers and scammers who are increasingly redirecting visitors to sites that sell porn, dodgy medicine and peddle Nigeria 419 scams.

Cox told the Post: "It should not be difficult for a company with Microsoft's resources to identify and mitigate that abuse in-house without any external input, but so far this has not happened."

"Microsoft's live.com system has for some time been supporting an illegal drug sales operation, and Microsoft has known this."

According to Spamhaus all networks claim to be anti-spam, but some execs "factor revenue made from hosting known spam gangs into corporate policy decisions to continue to sell services to spam operations. Others simply decide that closing the holes in their end-user broadband systems that allow spammers access would be too costly to their bottom lines.”

We asked Microsoft what it was doing to curtail spammers hitching a ride on its service, but at time of writing it hadn’t responded to our request for comment. ®