Today, Microsoft has switched off Vacation Reply feature to prevent or fight spam in Hotmail. Windows Live Hotmail is a big brand name, having millions of users across the world.

Hotmail is being accessed in dozens of languages, on different web-browsers running on different operating systems. As Report says- 8 billion messages are processed everyday with 2.5 billion messages being delivered to the inbox (the difference between those two numbers is primarily blocked spam).

But the war is still on and Microsoft discovered that spammers were using Hotmail’s automatic vacation reply feature to send spam from their Hotmail accounts and decided to temporarily suspend the feature.

Krish Vitaldevara, Lead Program Manager, Windows Live Hotmail says-

In our fight against spam, we sometimes have to make hard choices, and we had to make one this week. We discovered that spammers were using Hotmail’s automatic vacation reply feature to send spam from their Hotmail accounts.

We decided to temporarily shut off the feature in order to shut down the spam. Of course, we know some of you like and use automatic  vacation replies to let people know when you can’t respond to e-mail for a while, and we’ll turn this feature back on as soon as we’ve worked out the best way to prevent it from being misused by spammers.