Microsoft deprecating SmartScreen filters

At the beginning of the month Microsoft announced that they were deprecating the SmartScreen filters used by the desktop Microsoft mail clients. These are the filters used in Exchange and various version of Outlook mail. This is yet further consolidation of spam filtering between the Microsoft free webmail domains, Office365 hosted domains and self hosted Exchange servers.  The online services (hotmail.com, outlook.com, Office365, live.com, etc) have been  using these filters for a while. The big change now is that they’re being pushed down to Exchange and Outlook users not hosted on the Microsoft site.
EOP was developed for Outlook.com (and friends) as well as Office365 users. From Microsoft’s description, it sounds like the type of machine learning engine that many providers are moving to.
Microsoft has published quite a bit of information about these filters and how they work on their website. One of the best places to start is the Anti-spam Protection FAQ. Something senders should pay attention to is the final question on that page: “What are a set of best outbound mailing practices that will ensure that my mail is delivered?” Those are all things  deliverability folks recommend for good inbox delivery.
Poking around looking at the links and descriptions, there is a host of great information about spam filtering at Microsoft and how it works.
A page of note is their Exchange Online Protection Overview. This describes the EOP process and how the filters work.
MS_filterProcess

An incoming message initially passes through connection filtering, which checks the sender’s reputation and inspects the message for malware. The majority of spam is stopped at this point and deleted by EOP. Messages continue through policy filtering, where messages are evaluated against custom transport rules that you create or enforce from a template. For example, you can have a rule that sends a notification to a manager when mail arrives from a specific sender. (Data loss prevention checks also occur at this point, if you have that feature; for information about feature availability, see the Exchange Online Protection Service Description.) Next, messages pass through content filtering, where content is checked for terminology or properties common to spam. A message determined to be spam by the content filter can be sent to a user’s Junk Email folder or to the quarantine, among other options, based on your settings. After a message passes all of these protection layers successfully, it is delivered to the recipient.

Well, if you ever wanted to know how Microsoft filters mail, now you do.
I’m also pleased to read that MS is continuing to support SNDS. I know it’s been problematic for folks lately and was somewhat concerned as the person who created SNDS recently moved to a new position. However, their FAQs still recommend SNDS so I think we can expect it to be maintained by new folks.
 
 

Related Posts

Improving Outlook Email Display

Today Litmus announced they had partnered with Microsoft to fix many of the rendering issues with Outlook. Congrats, Litmus! This is awesome. I know a lot of folks have tried to get MS to the table to fix some of the problems with Outlook. Take a bow for getting this off the ground.
According to Litmus, the partnership has two parts.

Read More

Getting unblocked at Outlook.com

It’s been a crazy week here at M3AAWG. I have a lot of stuff to blog about, but I think one of the really important things to get out is the new unblock request page at Outlook / Hotmail.
https://sender.office.com
Submit your IPs and it will be reviewed.
(Apologies for the repeated bad links. I’m blaming con crud, lack of sleep and MSN/Hotmail/Office/Outlook for having so many domains I can’t keep them straight. I have finally gotten it right and tested it.)

Read More

Outlook 365 having a bad day

I’ve seen scattered reports today that some mail to the Outlook 365 servers is failing. This has been confirmed by ZDNet. Only folks with a Office 365 account can log in and see the status messages, but there are some folks on the mailop list posting updates from the website.
Attempts to mail to affected domains results in this response:

Read More