Hotmail's Spam Filter: The Best In the Business? 182
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."
Idle? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Hotmail SPAM filter... wait, they have one? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
what a joke (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Anecdotal evidence: (Score:5, Informative)
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.
false positives (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:Are you kidding me???? (Score:4, Informative)
Add the sender as a contact, and it will stop spam-binning it for you permanently without your "not spam" flags affecting other user's filtering.
Re:Glad to hear they've figured it out (Score:5, Informative)
I remember that story.
Microsoft bought Hotmail. Then it came out that Hotmail was using *nix servers instead of Windows and much was made of Microsoft not eating their own dog food, so Microsoft made it a big priority to get them on Windows ASAP... and failed miserably, causing service outages etc. and making the original bad PR substantially worse.
People were making fun of them for years after that.
Re:Are you kidding me???? (Score:4, Informative)
It you think hotmail is bad for receiving messages, try sending e-mail to a hotmail box as a small independent mail server or website.
What you will find is that hotmail randomly drops your messages. No bounce message, no error, it's not even put in the freaking junk mail folder, it's just plain gone. Have they even heard of RFC 821?? (And yes, you have jumped through all the hoops: you have proper HELO, rdns, spf...)
Then you try to complain to the standard postmaster account, as is a standard and required practice. OK, haha, you didn't really think that would work, did you? Instead, you have to go through customer service, with support drones who ask more and more information from you FOR WEEKS, and never resolve your issue. Infuriating.