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Hotmail's Spam Filter: The Best In the Business?
Barence writes "Microsoft claims an "independent" report proves it has the best spam protection in the industry — an argument deconstructed by PC Pro. 'Our own internal metrics, customer feedback, and even a recent third-party report confirms that no mail service offers better protection than Hotmail,' Microsoft's Dick Craddock wrote in a Windows Live blog post earlier this week."
Hotmail's spam protection is awful! I get about 15-20 spam messages/day and about one every couple of months on my gmail account.
I work at a university and Hotmail has on a number of occasions blocked all mail from our domain as an overreaction to some compromised accounts sending mail to hotmail users. These blocks have lasted for days while we have to ask them to revert this. They've been completely unwilling to whitelist our domain or even incorporate a more expedient process for getting these blocks resolved. We have never had any similar problems with Google, Yahoo, etc..
Their metrics for "best" are flawed if they block tens of thousands of good accounts and emails on account of a few compromised accounts, which every institution with over 20,000 users will have. I'm sure their users appreciate not getting normal mail from some domains for days instead of a slightly larger spam folder.
Back in 2003 or so I gave up on my Hotmail account because if I didn't clear out the spam every 3 days, it would fill up my mailbox and delete all my older (read: personal and legitimate) email messages. This was when a free account only included 2MB of storage. After losing all my email a couple times over a period of several months, I gave up on it. I think I maxed out the number of custom filters you could have with attempts to delete junk automatically, which gave me maybe one more day.
I switched to Yahoo and eventually Gmail, and on the latter I receive one or two junk messages per day. False positives are rare, and spam NEVER gets to my inbox. Of course, the same day I signed up for Gmail, I started getting spam, before I ever even used the address anywhere.
my, your, his/her/its, our, your, their
I'm, you're, he's/she's/it's, we're, you're, they're
True Story.
A few years ago a close friend died. It was pretty difficult to deal with actually. Shortly before the funeral I was in front of my computer, and in tears. I remember saying out loud that I just wished I could talk with him one more time.
An email came in that second from him. I stared at it for a minute or two and then opened it up. It was just some chit chat about what were going to do later in the week and thanking me for something.
Got stuck due to some DNS/Mail server error and took 4 days to make it out of his servers to mine.
Not being particularly religious I thought that was a miracle given the timing. I could rationalize all the tech stuff, but the timing of that message will always amaze me.
Not so. If you use ANY other passport account attached to your hotmail it stays active. I checked mine the other day for the first time in about 1 year... Over 1000 spam mails.
No fucking idea where MS gets their data from. With gmail I get 1 spam message through the filter once every few months if that, looks like hotmail is closer to 100 per month. I smell astroturfing.