While hacker attacks have always been one of the major threats in computer world, spam has become one of the biggest problems during the last decade. Junk mail is not only annoying, but companies have to spend millions of U.S. dollars on finding ways to decrease the spam message flow.

According to Microsoft, 90% of all e-mails are spam, and not all of them are just advertising messages. Many junk mails carry spyware and different kind of harmware, which could threaten information security. This autumn, Microsoft is going to introduce to its Hotmail and MSN users a new way of filtering incoming messages.

?Sometime around November, Hotmail and MSN will flag as potential spam those messages that do not have the tag to verify the sender. The move is meant to spur adoption of Sender ID,?said Craig Spiezle, Microsoft's director in the technology care and safety group at the software maker.

Sender ID is a specification for verifying the authenticity of e-mail by ensuring the validity of a server from which the e-mail came. But not all are fond of the idea of adopting this technology.

?We think Microsoft is trying to strong-arm the industry into the adoption of an incomplete and not accepted standard,?said Dave Rand, chief technologist for Internet content security at security software company Trend Micro.

?Microsoft's move increases pressure on e-mail senders to adopt Sender ID. The technology requires Internet service providers, companies and other Internet domain holders to publish so-called SPF (Sender Policy Framework) records to identify their mail servers. About 1 million domains currently publish SPF records, Microsoft said. That's far from the 71.4 million registered domains worldwide at the end of last year,?writes CNET News.com.

• CNET News.com: Microsoft Pushes Spam-Filtering Technology.