Hotmail Contest Pits Webmail Providers Against Each Other In Spam Battle Hotmail has more than earned its reputation for being a spam trap. For years huge amounts of spam were sent and received by hotmail.com accounts. However, to their credit they have been making a real effort to change that. They are so confident in their efforts that they hired a firm to put them to the test against their biggest competitors, Gmail and Yahoo! Mail. To conduct the test, they created email accounts on each service and then “seeded†them buy posting them on Facebook, blogs and a variety of websites including pirate sites. They then observed the accounts for five weeks. Not surprisingly, they got spammed. Here’s a look at how much of the total email received for each account was spam: Hotmail: 48.57% spam Gmail: 48.8 % spam Yahoo! Mail: 58.33% spam Yahoo! promptly contested the results, claiming 99.9% of all spam is blocked before reaching the inbox. I had a Yahoo! account, and I’m not buying it – in fact I stopped using the account because I was sick of the spam flood! Google defended Gmail as well saying they are constantly refining their filtering process and technology. Hotmail credits its turn around to its new Smartscreen technology which blocks malware and phishing attacks as well: “Hotmail, in all honesty, had just gotten behind in the game against indefatigable spammers,†said David Law, director of product management for Hotmail. “Because we were at a high level in 2006, I think Hotmail probably suffers from some misperceptions that linger from those days.†He added, “I think when people see the study, they’ll be surprised. We’re starting to see some real momentum with people coming to Hotmail, particularly from Yahoo,†he said. “We definitely have a confidence we haven’t had in a while.†Hotmail has also worked hard to prevent spammers from signing up and abusing the service, and is joining Gmail, Yahoo! Mail and other email providers in creating a new anti-spam standard called DMARC which relies on authenticated senders to prevent spam, email spoofing and phishing. Source: http://www.allspammedup.com/2012/02...-providers-against-each-other-in-spam-battle/
Hotmail also blocks or rejects 40% or more legitimate mail in their overzealous efforts to wage war on "spam". I'd rather get 100 junk messages and ALL of my email rather than 10 junk messages and only 60% of my email.
