I love reading stories like this, but with a background in fighting spam I'm a bit skeptical. I would love to hear more details.

For those of you who don't know, most of Microsoft's anti-spam efforts are from techniques I suspect are hard to translate to the HIV domain. Microsoft catches the overwhelming majority of spam (98%) using IP address blocking. Most of the remaining spam is caught using long lists of regular expressions managed by humans. I would not expect researchers to be crafting regular expressions or mapping blocklists to protein sequences. Maybe they are, but the article makes it sound like some algorithmic approach.

Obviously there are more modern techniques for fighting spam, but Microsoft isn't using them yet, and I hardly think of Microsoft as a leader in this space.