Hotmail, the web-based email service of Microsoft, is ranked number one to protect users against unwanted email including spams while its competetitors Gmail and Yahoo come to second and third place respectively.
For quite some time, Hotmail, the free web-based email service from Microsoft, has earned the reputation of being a clunky, slow, outdated email service. Whether this is true or not is certainly up for debate and depends on well personal preference. But the Windows Live team, with a renewed commitment, has been constantly updating Hotmail to make it not only more user-friendly with outlook-like features but also more secure; and it seems their hard work is paying off.
According to a comprehensive study that has been conducted by an independent firm, Cascade Insights, Hotmail is now the number one webmail service to protect users against spams ahead of other webmail competitors including Gmail and Yahoo! Mail. To evaluate the spam protective system of each webmail service, the Insights team uses a methodology which consisting of first creating email from these webmail services on the same day, then seeding these emails which is a method to make the email known by posting in comment blog section and using the email to register to different online services and reply to message that are considered SPAM. After the email has been completed seeded, the team proceed with an inbox analysis of each email counting the number of spam.
“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: Our research determined that approximately 48% of the emails in the inbox for Gmail and Hotmail were SPAM. 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.”
Well it is worth noting that Hotmail has an edge, although slight, over Gmail. And the Windows Live team have made sure that people know it. In the official Windows Live blog, Dick Craddock talks about the findings and what makes Hotmail the obvious webmail choice for consumers. “As much as we invest in our own telemetry and instrumentation to understand the spam problem, sometimes it’s nice to get an outside perspective. Cascade Insights gave us just that recently with a comprehensive study of the major email services to see how each performed in the face of incoming spam. We were excited to see an analyst go deep on SPAM and compare the different webmail providers, so we’ve paid Cascade for rights to access and distribute their private report and methodology.” Talking about the collaboration between Cascade Insights and Hotmail team, then he continues “The short story? No one did better than Hotmail. In fact, Hotmail and Gmail were dead even when dealing with spam, and both did much better than other email providers.”
But Microsoft, on its part, has other way to assess the level of protection that it offers and users’ level of satisfaction. The Hotmail team is reaching this goal by driving true SITI down as low as possible, reducing clutter and giving the users way to automatically filter their inboxes with the new graymail filters, and reducing obvious spam in the Junk folder. All this lead to customer complaining less Dick explains.
While Hotmail is better at protecting users against spams according to the research, there are other features that make Hotmail ideal other than the protection that if offers with the SmartScreen technology. SkyDrive, the free online storage of Microsoft, comes with 25GB of free space that available for users to store pictures and other types of documents, and the free online office web version is nothing to complain about.
