14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft’s Hotmail webmail service is more effective when it comes to blocking spam than rival leading similar services, a recent study has shown.
In the past years, Microsoft has been hard at work with upgrading Hotmail so that it would filter spam better than before. Spam that makes it to the inbox has decreased from 30 percent in 2006 to less than 3 percent today.
Apparently, Hotmail is capable of blocking spam better than Gmail and far more effectively than Yahoo! Mail, and the aforementioned report proves it.
The results come from a study conducted by research firm Cascade Insights. The firm notes that, while the analysis was commissioned by Microsoft, the testing was conducted independently from the company’s influence.
Sean Campbell, co-owner of Cascade Insights, notes that “researchers had full reign over the methodology and approach,” LiveSide reports.
Researchers created email accounts for all the major providers and then worked on attracting spam from a variety of sites, including legitimate and suspicious looking.
The email received in each of the inboxes was sorted as SPAM and HAM (legitimate email, including newsletters to which they subscribed) and the amount of each category was then counted.
From November 14th to December 20th, Hotmail managed to filter the most spam, narrowly edging Gmail.
“After we sorted the inbox into HAM and SPAM, we then counted how many HAM and SPAM emails were present to determine the percentage of the inbox that was SPAM and found the following (see the image to the left),” the research firm notes.
“Our research determined that approximately 48% of the emails in the inbox for Gmail and Hotmail were SPAM,” the company explains.
“With Yahoo!, the percentage rose to 58%. For a completely unfiltered mail account, 64% of the emails were SPAM. Our findings therefore indicate that Hotmail and Gmail are approximately equal in keeping SPAM out of the inbox.”
Those who would like, to learn some more info on the study should go to Cascade Insights’s website.
