So how bad is Microsoft's spaces.live.com spam problem?

Recently, I've been seeing heavy use of spaces.live.com URLs as spam gateway pages, promoting everything from pills to fake watches, from Russian brides to — embarrassingly for Microsoft, whose own products are among those offered — pirated software. The use of these domains gives spam messages a kind of limited 'respectability'. Instead of directly listing the Chinese-hosted sites that sell their products, easily identifiable by spam filters, they can trade on the name of the corporate giant to get the message through.

My quick and crude count identified just under 1700 unique Spaces accounts that had been created by spammers since the start of February. The Spaces spams amounted to about 3.5% of all the spam in our recent archives. Neither of these numbers is huge, but they're clearly too large. More worryingly, discussion of the spaces.live.com spam problem suggests that many of the domains are staying alive for extended periods of time.

But this stuff should be low-hanging fruit for Microsoft. For instance, checking our archives turned up almost 100 Spaces subdomains whose names begin with 'thequickereasierway'. Those could all have been deleted in a heartbeat. The actual content of pages on the bogus domains is highly-predictable and repetitious, making them easy to identify using the same kind of techniques used to identify any other kind of spam. And a few simple honeypot email accounts could generate an almost continuous list of Spaces URLs that are overdue for termination.

I don't want to underestimate the difficulty of keeping up with the spammers, but at the same time, a company with all the resources that Microsoft possesses shouldn't be having this problem. Microsoft has just been in the news for its efforts to shut down the Waledac botnet. How come they can't seem to keep their own house in order?