MSN's Hotmail hires anti-spam company

Aiming to fend off the mounting spam sent to Hotmail public e-mail accounts, MSN on Wednesday is expected to announce a deal with BrightMail, which makes anti-spam filters. The deal expands on an earlier partnership between San Francisco-based BrightMail and Microsoft's MSN, which has deployed BrightMail filters on its Internet access service.

After months of talks with the company to expand the relationship, MSN now intends to install BrightMail's spam filtering system for its 110 million Hotmail e-mail subscribers. Expected in the fall, the system will be used to block spam at the server level before junk mail reaches subscriber inboxes. Financial details were not disclosed.