We all know that email account hijacking can be a pain in the you know what. Today, Hotmail introduced a new feature for its users that allows them to flag a suspicious email received from a friend. Users will be able to mark the email as “My friend’s been hacked!” and will automatically submit all emails received from that friend into the junk email folder.
In a Windows Live Team blog post, Microsoft mentions that users with weak passwords are easy targets. Once a user’s email account is hijacked, their friends often find out before they do.
Hotmail will allow you to report your friend’s account as compromised in just one easy step. When you get a spam message from a friend, just click the “My friend’s been hacked!” on the “Mark as” menu:
Microsoft will lock down the email account to prevent further spam and is working closely with Yahoo and Google to accept these spam reports.
From what Microsoft says, this feature has been available for a few weeks now and thousands of hijacked users have been identified. Microsoft claims to take 1 day to return the account to its rightful owner.
