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."
Are you kidding me???? (Score:5, Interesting)
no difference (Score:3, Interesting)
Bad metrics for "best" (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Glad to hear they've figured it out (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Microsoft is still buying crap research. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
This is a pretty outrageous lie even for Microsoft (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Irrelevant (Score:2, Interesting)
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Easy to be the best (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Easy to be the best (Score:5, Interesting)
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.