Microsoft's Spam Plan

Microsoft is bringing out bigger guns in the fight against spam.

The company last week published the addresses of its Hotmail E-mail servers and got Amazon.com Inc. to do the same, as the first step in a plan to reject E-mail that appears to come from trusted sources but is spam. It's part of a larger E-mail-proof scheme called Caller ID for E-mail that Microsoft proposed last week. "Our goal here is to get rid of spam," chairman Bill Gates said at the RSA Security Conference in San Francisco. Microsoft says spam undermines users' trust in the Internet and their PCs.