Lucian Constantin
CSO Senior Writer

Microsoft to resume email-based security notifications

news
Jul 1, 20142 mins

The next security notifications will go out Thursday ahead of monthly security patches

Microsoft has backtracked on a plan to stop sending email-based notifications about security bulletins starting this month.

The company informed its customers Friday that beginning Tuesday it would no longer send security-related notifications via email because of “changing governmental policies concerning the issuance of automated electronic messaging.”

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The decision would have affected notifications about upcoming security bulletins, security bulletin summaries, new security advisories, and revisions to security bulletins and advisories.

“In lieu of email notifications, you can subscribe to one or more of the RSS feeds described on the Security TechCenter website,” Microsoft said at the time.

Even though the company didn’t reveal what specific governmental policies led to its decision, there was speculation that the reason might be a new Canadian antispam law that goes into effect today and carries penalties as high as $1 million for individuals and $10 million for businesses.

Regardless of the cause, Microsoft seems to have sorted out the problem and has decided to restore the notification service.

The company reviewed its processes after announcing the change and will keep sending the email notices, it said Monday.

Lucian Constantin

Lucian Constantin writes about information security, privacy, and data protection for CSO. Before joining CSO in 2019, Lucian was a freelance writer for VICE Motherboard, Security Boulevard, Forbes, and The New Stack. Earlier in his career, he was an information security correspondent for the IDG News Service and Information security news editor for Softpedia.

Before he became a journalist, Lucian worked as a system and network administrator. He enjoys attending security conferences and delving into interesting research papers. He lives and works in Romania.

You can reach him at lucian_constantin@foundryco.com or @lconstantin on X. For encrypted email, his PGP key's fingerprint is: 7A66 4901 5CDA 844E 8C6D 04D5 2BB4 6332 FC52 6D42

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