Last month, Microsoft announced its anti-spam initiative, designed to help combat the proliferation of spam, the unwanted, often deceptive commercial e-mail sent to consumers. One of the key pillars of this initiative was kicked off today as Microsoft announced it has filed 13 civil suits in the U.S. for sending unwanted, deceptive commercial e-mail to Microsoft customers and two suits in the U.K. for illegal "harvesting" of customer e-mail addresses and other illegal spamming practices.

The U.S. suits are filed against alleged spammers that try to fool customers by providing false information in the "from" line of the e-mail or using deceptive subject lines, such as "Your Visa bill" or "Credit Card Refund" to trick them into opening the message. Microsoft has also amended two complaints previously filed in California against "John Doe" defendants accused of "harvesting" e-mails of Microsoft customers to name the specific individuals that it believes are responsible in those cases.

The linked article is an interview with Tim Cranton, a senior attorney at Microsoft in charge of defining legal strategies in the spam lawsuits, and Stirling McBride, a senior investigator at Microsoft in charge of identifying and tracking down alleged spammers discovered by Microsoft technical teams.