The new Smart Network Data Services will enable IP address block owners to view reports on the volume of email being sent from their networks to Hotmail, and see how much of that email is being filtered as spam.

Hotmail stops about three billion spams a day and has over 200 million active users, Microsoft says. This gives it a unique insight into what types and volumes of spam are being sent to consumers. ISPs now will get access to a slice of that data.

They can then take appropriate action, such as identifying and cleaning compromised machines, increasing the security measures for the host or network, or working with the party that sent the messages to determine if it is spam or legitimate, Microsoft said.

The move sees Microsoft adding its voice to those of the US Federal Trade Commission, UK Office of Fair Trading and over 20 other regulators around the world, which have also started leaning on ISPs to tighten up their anti-spam policies.

Earlier this week, the FTC announced Operation Spam Zombies, basically a letter-writing campaign in which 3,000 or more ISPs are gently encouraged to implement port filtering and throttling to cut down on the amount of spam their users inadvertently send.

SNDS appears to offer ISPs a unique insight into how spammy they are. While there are other ways to quantify how much spam they are sending, it has not been possible to get the perspective of such as large email recipient.

The new service comes as part of a broader launch, MSN Postmaster, which offers more information to email senders on how Microsoft handles emails, such as details of its SmartFilter and Brightmail email filters.

The company also said it will start to promote the Sender ID Framework directly to Hotmail users, by alerting them with messages such as The sender of this message could not be verified by Sender ID when they open email.

These messages would appear when the email’s sender has not published a Sender Policy Framework assertion in their DNS records, or if Microsoft could not verify that the email came from an SPF-authorized mail server.

This move could accelerate the adoption of SIDF and SPF, but will likely irk some SPF supporters who guide the development of the standard and generally do not like Microsoft talking about SPF and SIDF in the same breath.

Microsoft has declared SPF, both technically and conceptually, to be a dependent and integral part of Sender-ID, the SPF Council said in March, in response to Microsoft statements. The SPF project firmly rejects this attempt at co-opting SPF.

Microsoft says Hotmail users will be able to find out more about SIDF with one click whenever they receive an alert.