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."
Easy to be the best (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Easy to be the best (Score:5, Insightful)
True.
Where I work, a small 10K student college, the majority of spam that we see originates from either hotmail or yahoo servers (from received headers). Yahoo even signs the spam coming from their servers).
Majority of spam links point to "live" urls (another [apparently poorly managed] M$ asset.
Google seems to know how to control their infrastructure. Although a lot of reply address go to gmail accounts.
Re:Easy to be the best (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Are you kidding me???? (Score:5, Insightful)
To be fair, the blog post seems to indicate that they're extolling their progress on the reverse. They're saying their best-in-industry as far as delivering the least amount of spam to hotmail inboxes, not whether hotmail addresses are the source of spam elsewhere.
That said, I have an e-mail address at basically every major mail service (gmail, yahoo, aim/aol, mail.com, a hosted exchange account, and hotmail). The only spam I get in Hotmail actually lands in my spam box, and there really isn't much of it to speak of.
I know that this is gonna be a smidge off-topic and paint me as a Microsoft shill, but I'm really not...Hotmail's notoriety was deserved in the 1990's, but unfortunately Microsoft has attached the poisoned name to a good product (which is why I opt to use live.com instead). MS really did well with integrating Hotmail, Skydrive, and Office Web Apps. Get a Word document as an attachment? open it on the spot without downloading, edit, and reply. Save to Skydrive to access it from basically anything. All three work as well in Chrome and Firefox as they do in IE (Opera support is a bit stubborn, admittedly), and doesn't require silverlight. The UI looks a lot like Outlook, sharing files via a link is piss simple (and gives options to share via Facebook and gives different links for read only and r/w access), and the ads aren't terribly intrusive. Yes, I fully credit Gmail and Google Docs for pushing Microsoft to the point where they've made a suite of web apps that are worth using. However, if you haven't visited a Windows Live account in the past year to see how genuinely nice it is to use...it's worth an objective look.
I have to say... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.