SNDS – Microsoft Helps ISPs Combat Spam

I mentioned Microsoft / MSN / Hotmail’s recent initiative SNDS a few days ago.
At the time I hadn’t really had the opportunity to explore it and was finding the navigation around it quite annoying (ie. I couldn’t find what I was looking for easily, so I got bored and left).
I’ve since has some time to explore the interface a bit more and, while I do believe it could be improved on, I would have to detract my previous comments (at least to some degree).
Once you have successfully added your IP blocks to the system you can access some very interesting reports. Choose any day in the past 90 days to see activity on your blocks. If there hasn’t been any noteworthy activity on a block no data will appear:

Please note that days where it sent less than 100 messages will be indistinguishable from days where it sent no messages at all, because neither will show up below.

So rather than being overwhelmed with data you can drill down to the important bits ie. the ones where the vast majority of mail was sent from.
To make it easier to decipher they’ve colour coded it as follows:

• Green – less than 10% spam
• Yellow – between 10% and 90% spam
• Red – more than 90% spam

You also get information on the sending address, although in cases of a security hole (eg. a php script) the sender address may not provide a lot of useful information (dependant on your configuration)
If you need to analyse the information or share it with others you can easily export data to CSV.
Hopefully they’ll add more information, such as sample emails, to the system in the future ………