According to InfoWorld, "Microsoft Corp. Chairman and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates will use his keynote address on Sunday at the annual Comdex 2003 trade show in Las Vegas to announce plans to make the company"s Exchange e-mail server better at stopping unsolicited commercial ("spam") e-mail, according to information obtained by IDG News Service."
"The new anti-spam feature, which Microsoft is calling the Exchange Intelligent Message Filter (IMF), uses heuristics technology developed internally at Microsoft, according to the information."
"Among other things, Gates will announce that Microsoft is adding heuristics-based anti-spam capabilities to future releases of Exchange Server 2003, which will enable Exchange Server to stop spam e-mail messages before they reach users" e-mail inboxes."
"Information from Microsoft"s Hotmail free Web-based e-mail service will be used to keep the Microsoft heuristics database up-to-date on the most recent spam trends."
"The new antispam features will be offered to customers who sign on to Microsoft"s Software Assurance program, which streamlines licensing different Microsoft products and gives customers automatic product update rights. A beta version of the antispam features will be available within a month, but Microsoft is not saying when the features will be generally available to Exchange customers, according to sources familiar with the company"s plans."