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Microsoft today is touting the findings of a third party study that shows that Hotmail edges out its key webmail competitors, Gmail and Yahoo! Mail, when it comes to fighting spam.
The study was performed by Cascade Insights and is available for download from web.
"Leading Web mail providers use sophisticated SPAM filtering mechanisms to keep unsolicited email messages out of user inboxes," an executive summary of the report notes. "Microsoft Hotmail and Google Gmail are approximately equally effective at filtering out spam, and substantially more so than Yahoo! Mail. All three providers reduce spam compared to unfiltered accounts."
"The results of this study show that Hotmail narrowly edged out Gmail, and is much more effective than Yahoo! Mail, at blocking spam attempting to enter the inbox," a Microsoft representative told me. "It's worth noting, the email addresses Cascade Insights used were created with the sole intention of becoming a spam target. Actual inboxes would have significantly less spam and, in the case of Hotmail, typically have less than 3% of spam in the inbox; however, this is a real comparison between the service providers from the customer’s perspective."
The Hotmail team says there are three important aspects to its efforts in fighting spam:
"If you're already using Hotmail, we want to hear from you," Microsoft's Dick Craddock notes. "You can use the Feedback link in Hotmail to let us know about your own spam experience. If you haven’t tried us out in a while, take a look."