Microsoft Makes Progress with Hotmail User Testing to Eradicate Spam Problem
Author: Ben Logan - Published: February 14, 2012 3:06 pm
While in the past Hotmail was notorious for excessive spam making it through to user accounts, they’ve been recently doing extensive user testing to tackle this issue, and with some impressive results.
It seems that Hotmail may have found an edge to be able to compete with the likes of Google –one of the most crucial factors for users of webmail service is excellent spam control, and Hotmail seems to have got it right.
A recent Microsoft funded study tested the anti-spam capabilities of Hotmail, Gmail, and Yahoo Mail. This was done by setting up accounts and seeding them across the Internet so as to catch the attention of spammers.
The resulting report findings were surprising – in Hotmail accounts, 48.57% of e-mails in the Inbox were spam, which is less than Google Mail which had 48.88%. The worst performer was Yahoo Mail at 58.33%
While all these statistics might seem alarmingly high, bear in mind that the test accounts were specifically set up to attract and filter spam, so they received a great deal more spam than a normal user’s webmail account.
So, even though Microsoft’s claim that “if you use Hotmail for your primary email, you’ll get the best spam protection in the industry – no one does it better” is not entirely the full picture, the usability test results do show that they have come a long way in improving Hotmail.
Category: Usability
