:: Deepquest ::

The Redmond, Wash., company, which has nearly 120 million e-mail customers through its Hotmail and MSN Internet services, confirmed Friday it had wrongly placed a group of Internet protocol addresses from AOL Time Warner’s RoadRunner broadband service and EarthLink on its “blocklist” of known spammers whose mail should be barred from customer in-boxes.

Once notified of the error by the two ISPs, MSN moved the IP addresses “over to a safe list immediately,” according to a Microsoft spokeswoman.

“Considering the different levels of (spam) protections on the MSN service, more spam mail is going to get blocked,” she said. “But if a (spammer) is working with an EarthLink address, for example, that inevitably could cause them to be blocked.”

MSN and Hotmail use spam-filtering software and services from San Francisco-based Brightmail, whose techniques focus on the message’s content when filtering spam. Beyond that, MSN’s spam-abuse team compiles its own list of IP addresses that are known to generate unsolicited junk messages, and it blocks all messages from them.

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