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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."
When you are the source.
There is or can be built a machine that can simulate any physical object. -Church-Turing principle
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 have accounts in both hotmail and gmail with about the same "exposure" on the internet and can't say i've seen any difference
with only one or two pieces showing up in the junk folder every couple weeks. I've been using Hotmail(Live) for a few years now.
bought a penis pump, ordered synthetic Viagra or sent money to Nigeria are automatically exempt from this study.
No one reads it any how, so just assume its all spam. Presto, 100% effective spam filtering.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
You're kidding, right?
Hotmail's spam filter is the worst in the business. It frequently places confuses spam and ham and what is worse is that sometimes it seems to think I'm on the mailing list of said spam list and automatically displays the content.
What staggers me is the number of phishing attempts that get into the spam folder, they should even be getting that far.
The only thing Hotmail is useful for is signing up for things that are almost certainly going to send spam.
Summation 2
Let me be among the first to chime in... Their spam filter sucks big time.
For the past 6-8 months (or more), I've been getting spam for all sorts of services that originate from the same sender. They use the SAME template! It's just a series of images, with THE ONLY TEXT being "Can't see Images? Click here". I marked such sh!t as Junk countless times, only to come back the next day to seeing some of the same ones in my Junk filter, some in my Inbox.
It doesn't matter that the subject line is the same - advertising for Match.com or some other crap, even though I mark it as Junk, apparently Hotmail does not even pretend to do anything about it. Same subject line, same template with images only.
THIS IS BASIC SPAM FILTER 101, if there is no address, or Unsubscribe in the newsletter, or a poor text to image ratio, IT IS SPAM! What the hell is their spam team researching?
And it has the most worthless spam configuration settings: all off, the useless "ON" setting, or the idiotic "exclusive" from your contacts only.
Wish T-Mobile would pick up some sort of spam filtering .. I'm getting a lot of crap on my mobile phone and don't want to sit around blocking this number or that, but have them block known text spammers (anything with 'prize' in the email address) or phonus balonus lottery/baby name/ whatever promoters.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
As usual, Microsoft is full of shit. My hotmail account allows the MOST spam through to my inbox. Gmail's filters are nearly perfect--I think I've only seen one spam message make it through in the past few years, whereas in hotmail, I've had to create a rule that moves anything not specifically addressed to me into the junk folder. Every day, that folder gets filled with spam from the likes of obviously faked domains like SEBUJIHJTPHJ@a.encloserrewall.com, and HUZDSUBYYZMB@a.gamelikeinconside.com. I've contacted hotmail demanding to know why their spam filter sucks so hard that they can't even filter out something as obvious as that. Of course, there's no response because as we can see, they're spending money on spokespeople rather than developers.
Furthermore, it's not just that hotmail fails to filter spam, the problem is that they have such an antiquated and feature-poor interface for users to control how incoming email is sorted. Then the web interface itself is extremely slow. I'm hardly a fan of Google but anyone with half a brain can see that Gmail is superior in EVERY CONCEIVABLE WAY. It's not even close.
Hotmail is for email you don't give a shit about, and when you don't want to give out a real address. Honestly, I don't even know why I still have it. I'd be better off creating a garbage gmail account and use that instead.
I have posted my Gmail address publicly without reservation for 7.5 years (see above). I get approximately 1 spam email to my inbox per week, out of a volume of several hundred per day to my spam folder.
I have relatives who use hotmail, who take paranoid care that their email is not posted on the internet in public, even in obfuscated form. They have changed addresses multiple times for this reason, but stuck with hotmail.
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
I run a small business, shipping many packages daily.
Nearly all the customers who don't get the confirmation email with the tracking number are using Hotmail. The message is sent from a proper server with valid SPF and Domain key signature. It contains no links or special content, just text with the tracking number. All the other mail services are very good about recognizing it as a legitimate email.
But not Hotmail. If anyone from Microsoft is reading this, your spam filters suck.
Calling this "independent" is hogwash. It's a scam MS has been pulling for well over a decade, paying for "independent" competitive studies whose design and publication they control, and then trumpeting the results of the ones that say things they like.
In this case, the methodology was designed in a way that only exposed the test addresses to a narrow subclass of spam and which helped rationalize the fact that the study is completely blind to false positives. It cannot be accidental that the most widespread criticism of Hotmail and Microsoft's other hosted mail services by outsiders who work with mail servers and spam control is not that they deliver or emit spam, but that they have massive chronic false positive problems, not just with mis-filing into "Spam" or rejecting in SMTP for no good reason, but with mail being accepted for delivery and vanishing without a trace, in large volumes. It's a mess and I am 100% certain that MS knows about internally, at least at senior mail geek levels. It is a spectacular display of chutzpah for MS to be applauding themselves for a study in which they would have been beaten by a email system with no Internet connectivity.
And as someone who has been dealing with spam filtering and prevention since before anyone at MS knew that "spam" wasn't just a Hormel product, I should add that a methodologically sound study of the filtering systems of the big freemailers is probably not possible in the real world. Different people get significantly different types of spam and non-spam based on the history of their addresses and how they use them, and you really can't say anything meaningful about an 'average' mail stream because no real address has one. The big freemail providers have a very hard job because of the scale and diversity of their user base and pathological business models, but that can't justify promotion of a study which ultimately is worthless.
Not only have I never received spam originating from a Gmail address, I might have seen spam make it to my inbox once in the past year. This is an address I've used for six years, and splattered all over the Interwebs. I also had three different Hotmail addresses, which I canceled to avoid spam.
Equally allegorical and equally convincing to me, I went through an episode with my mother-in-law where spam began to be sent from her email address to everyone, and I mean everyone, in her address book, multiple times per day. Now, she doesn't typically engage in risky Internet behavior, being the kind of person who is skeptical of ATMs because she's afraid they'll withdraw the money without actually giving it to her. Suffice to say it caused a bit of a problem. She's sticking with Hotmail because, as she says, "that's the address everyone has for her", against all advice to the contrary.
This unbiased moderation brought to you by the Porcine Aviation Group!
I have, shall we say, more than a little experience in the spam area. And having studied it in considerable detail over a very long period of time, I can say -- rather definitively -- that Hotmail does, and has done for many years, an absolutely horrible job of controlling outbound spam. (Which is of course the most important criteria by which to measure them. Inbound spam only matters to those with accounts there. Outbound spam matters to the entire Internet.) The only reason I would award them an "F" grade for their performance is that there is no lower grade available.
My handle is somewhat a reflection of my own nature, which can be condescending and indeed, arrogant. But even I wouldn't attempt something of this magnitude: Microsoft isn't merely exaggerating, they're absolutely, completely, totally lying.
It's irrelevant to boast the best spam filters when you hard code spam into people's outgoing mail below their signature.
Google, for all its email faults, (and it has some real doozies -- some of them drive me batty) hasn't thrown a good email into spam in many months. I probably see an actual spam in the inbox perhaps once a week, which I delight in marking as spam to help other gmail users. That's pretty darned good; I compulsively check both the inbox and the spambox, and I am *extremely* satisfied with Google's ability to discriminate.
I haven't used Hotmail in years, so it's impossible for me to say they're better or worse, but I am dead certain that Google is "good enough" here.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.