it should be an option. as useful as it may be to people unfamiliar with phishing sites and virus’ etc etc, people who do know what they are doing, are just being restricted. it should be up to us, what links we do and do not click on.

What would be an easy fix that would require them to update only the website itself, and not the software, is to have the option to completely “Not show this warning message” (if it were chosen, the site would redirect you there without prompting the message) or at the very least “Do not show this warning message for this domain again.”

I like it because no matter what browser you are using, you will get SmartScreen information, it the site you are about to go to is malicious or whatever, as SmartScreen works well, actually. I don’t get why there is no off option anyways, as you can turn off SmartScreen in Internet Explorer.

A.) Phishing sites
B.) URL-Shortened sites

Nothing I hate more on Messenger than people using URL Shorteners, link dumping, and not telling me what it is. If the SmartScreen was able to tell me what’s beyond the link, sees past the shortened URL to where it’s really going, then yeah, I wouldn’t mind having it. But I’d rather have it configurable so that it doesn’t screen trusted URLs of sites I visit on a regular basis.

I don’t mind spam filtering, so long as e-mail is simply redirected into a Spam folder that I can review & delete at will.

While not a confidence inspirer, this is likely purely technical. With a limit to URL length, the first URL is more likely to see your original URL (if suitably long) be truncated and not function correctly.

The domain name is dumb, as you say.

It really, really, really should be possible to turn it off.

For less technical people I’m sure it will help. For people like us it provides zero value and just wastes our time and gets in our way (like most other security features in Messenger) or, at best, does nothing at all.

What is the point anyway? Any modern browser already has some kind of malware filter which will warn you if the url you’re requesting is known to be a bad site. You don’t have to redirect people to make that work. It seems Microsoft’s real motive for doing this is gathering more data on which links are sent through Messenger, probably so the can analyze the most sent links for malware before anyone even reports them as malware. If that is the case and they are not making it optional, why are they not just catching links on the Messenger server? AFAIK every conversation goes through Messenger’s servers, logging all links directly from there should be possible. Then they can analyze links/domains which show suspicious activity and ass the results to their SmartScreen service. And the can advice people to use IE and SmartScreen to be optimally protected, which we’ll happily ignore.

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/bpy7h/think_youre_immune_to_phishing_attacks_see_if_you/

The original website is not up anymore but I think the comments there serve as a pretty good anecdotal evidence that even tech-savvy people are susceptible to these kind of phishing attacks. I know, I know, you are always supposed to check against the domain name and everything but I think that kind of dialogue is still an excellent way to discourage at least some phishing attacks.

It’s a different story whether the users “get used to” these dialogs.