You have probably received weird sounding emails from your friends before, and for those who us who are more suspicious in nature, we think “spam” and don’t bother opening it. Spam and account hacking is not new when it comes to public hosted emails from Hotmail, Yahoo and even Gmail has not been exempt from said malicious activities. This is probably due to the clicking of links with misleading titles and also probably due to poor choice of passwords, which is why Hotmail has rolled out two new features that is aimed to deal with those issues.
The first issue would be when you receive spam emails from your friends or family, and instead of just deleting them or marking as spam (and to never receive emails from them again), Hotmail will now allow you to mark that particular email under “My friend’s been hacked!” What this does is that it basically suspends the account so that the spammer will no longer have access to it, and when your friend or family member attempts to login, they will be put through an account recovery flow procedure that will give them back control of their account.
On top of that, to further prevent hacking of email accounts and the sending of spam, Hotmail will no longer allow users to put “123456” or “password” as their password anymore. This particular feature will be rolling out soon and users whom Microsoft has deemed to be using these types of common passwords will be asked somewhere down the line the change it to a stronger password.
It sounds like pretty good security-based features right there, and while personally I don’t use Hotmail anymore, I’m guessing that Hotmail users around the world should be equally pleased by these new features.
Filed in . Read more about Email, Hotmail, Microsoft, Password, Phishing and Spam.