Microsoft will not be shutting off its security notification mailing list for systems administrators and other security professionals today, despite informing them late last week that the service would be coming to an end.
A Microsoft spokesperson told GeekWire that the company had “reviewed its policies” and chose to continue the email service. It’s an important service that provides people with notifications about a variety of security topics, including news about security bulletins before Patch Tuesday as well as subsequent bulletins and patches.
The previous decision to end the list came as Canada is set to start enforcing provisions in an anti-spam law. The law, passed in 2010, allowed businesses to send emails on the basis of implied consent if Canadian residents had entered into a business relationship with the sender, such as buying a product from a retailer. Starting today, businesses need to receive explicit consent from Canadian recipients, or face a hefty fine.
It’s clear that Microsoft originally thought that its security list might run afoul of that rule, but has now decided that it can choose to keep sending emails to the existing list and not fear legal action from the Canadian government.
That’s good news for IT professionals, since the only other way to get notifications from Microsoft is reading through the many security-related RSS feeds that the company publishes. That requires using a RSS reader, and checking it regularly. One of the nice things about emails is that they arrive in a user’s inbox whenever there’s news, not just whenever someone remembers to check them.
People who were already signed up for Microsoft’s security mailing list don’t need to do anything to receive the next set of notifications, which will roll out as a part of Microsoft’s Advanced Notification Service on July 3. People who want to sign up for the list can do so here.
