Who has Better Spam Protection? Yahoo, Gmail & Hotmail Tested
78The Great Free Webmail Spam Filter Experiment
How I Tested:
- On January 9th, I signed up for a free Yahoo, Hotmail, and Gmail address: woahmatt@yahoo.com, woahmatt@gmail.com, woahmatt@hotmail.com
- Posted all three addresses on a few forums, and on my blog and made them clickable. This is one way that spambots find your email address, by crawling the web looking for clickable email addresses. I didn't see much result from this because having your email address "harvested" this way, takes time. I did this experiment for about 30 days, so I never really saw the fruits of my labor for this method.
- Entered all three addresses in a seedy "Win a Free iPod!" website. (Believe it or not, I didn't win!) The spam REALLY starting flowing after this, starting with about one piece every couple of days, and then suddenly growing exponentially.
- Waited 29 days.
Critera for "Winning"
If a piece of junk mail enters the junk folder, I consider that to be a success. So, whoever has the least amount of spam in the inbox, is the winner.
3rd Place: Yahoo Mail
Yahoo Mail lost, hands down. No contest. I was surprised actually how poorly Yahoo handled spam. Sixty-two pieces of Spam accumulated in my inbox (not counting my three "welcome" emails from Yahoo), in a mere 29 days. Phishing emails, shady credit cards, you name it, this address got it.
- INBOX: 62 (not counting the three "welcome to Yahoo" emails)
- Bulk Folder: 89
2nd Place: Hotmail
Compared to Yahoo Mail, Hotmail did a fairly respectable job of keeping my inbox from being cluttered with spam. Eleven emails, minus one "welcome" email from Hotmail. Honestly, I thought that Hotmail was going to perform the worst of the three. One interesting thing is that it's junk folder only had eight emails inside.
- Inbox: 11 (not including the one "welcome to Hotmail" email)
- Junk Folder: 8
The Winner: Gmail
With a mere three pieces of spam in my inbox, Gmail is the winner, by far. Gmail's Spam folder had a whopping 579 emails in it.
Why are there so many more pieces of spam in my Gmail spam folder than in my other folders? Often times, mail services will off block items that they determine are undeniably spam BEFORE they even get to your email account. Gmail seems to let a lot more of them through. I'm not sure why. Maybe its a psychological thing, so you can see just how much spam Gmail is blocking, so you can feel really impressed. Well, I'm impressed anyway!
- Inbox: 3 (Not including one "welcome to Gmail" email)
- Spam folder: 580
It's Not Over
I'm not done with my webmail spam experiment just yet. To be fair, I'm going to start marking items as "junk mail". Some mail filters need to be "trained" to work more effectively. So for the next couple of months, I'll see which of the three services will improve with "training". I'll let you know what I find.
Screenshots of Yahoo, Gmail, & Hotmail After 29 Days
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Hey Michael,
This study was done in 2008.
I can see where you're coming from with regards to who you think won. However, what was important to me was what actually ended up IN my inbox. Those three addresses should've received the same amount of spam. Mail hosts often will block items that are undboubtedly spam from even getting to the users spam folder. So I can't judge it just on ratios of spam folder to inbox folder.
Excellent article and informative!
hmmm... I wonder if I should mark that as spam.......
I did the same experiment a long time ago... Gmail is the best hands down. It's by google after all, the number 1 "harvester."
Some unwanted message came through my hotmail advertizing bar telling me I'd won something, and wouldn't go away,until I gave some personal info. Then I received some spam, then it died down. I won't do that again, but was curious about what would happen.
The logic behind more mail in Junk for Gmail is pretty simple...they have unlimited stoarage so they block zero mails. All mails are delivered. But the spam is delevered to spam folder is where they Win. Again, its the same algorithm used for G search. And hotmail missing mails - they block email and do not deliver it once their filters recognize it as spam...Alas few legitimate mails get blocked too...that sucks. Now..am surprised how AOL was ommited from this test?
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Thanks for this post. It is a great articles.
One further point to add to gmails supremecy is that I have never had a false-positive: a non-spam email end up in the spam folder. With Yahoo and Hotmail, I've had emails from friends and emails that I have actually requested (eg password reminders) filed into the junk or bulk folders, which makes it just like another inbox I have to check. This has never happened with gmail.
I have the three accounts, and though I haven't rigorously compared them all, I can say that yahoo and gmail filter spam pretty well. However, by far, hotmail is the worst.
Yahoo does the worse job with spam. I have just about used up all my filter and spam information that they allow. I have written to them asking why if I block a subject in the filters, (blocking email does no good because most are not real email addresses) I keep getting spam. Also laugh because I send email from me to me when I want to save something and that usually goes into spam, they elevated that one but I have yet to hear a response, I also get email Yahoo writes to me in my spam filter and sometimes quite often even if in my contacts that also goes to spam. I always find at least 2 spam emails EVERYTIME I open yahoo. I also also have a Hotmail account,rarely do I get spam in my inbox. Sadly my internet provider uses Yahoo.
Been using Gmail for 2 years now your results are dead on. Thanks for confirming my suspicions about the ouher 2 and thanks for doing the study. ok back to google. jeff in toronto
I dont like using the spam folder, why check two folders all the time, all my mail goes in the main box. I have used all three services for many years, here is my report.
1. Hotmail has never got one piece of spam in all the years I have had the service.
2. Yahoo gets various amounts depending on how active a particular address is. (I have 4)
3. Gmail gets tons of spam, and I rarely even use the address for anything.
You missed the other half of the problem.. when good emails end up in Spam. This has happened me on Gmail and Hotmail! So please answer me..
How can gmail be the winner if you have to trawl through a gigantic folder of 1000s of spam messages every day for the rest of life???
Hotmail gives you WAY more less junk mail by not even letting it in your junk mail folder which makes it so much more the winner!! Don't you see the logic in this?
With Hotmail I can have a quick look through the junk mail while with gmail I have given up looking through 10000s of spam.
Brian,
Hotmail's spam filter is clearly inferior to gmails. I trust you have never used gmail before.
So you are saying that you would rather have legitimate email that is accidentally mislabeled completely rejected by "not even letting it in your junk mail folder" rather than having the option of sifting through some spam? excellent idea
its a good idea allright "not even letting definitely spam in your junk mail folder". saves a lot of sifting if your hotmail email address is 10 years old like mine. i only get maybe spam type messages
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Did you try setting the hotmail junk filter to exclusive? You would have gotten zero junk mail in your inbox. Your mailbox would only get emails from senders in your contacts or your safe senders list, everything else would have gone to the junk mail folder. I set my junk mail folder to clean emails older than 10 days. I look in the junk mail box once a day to see if there is anything I need and move it to my inbox. If not I don't have to spend time deleting, it automatically goes away. I find that it saves lots of time. Right now I have 568 pieces of junk mail in the junk mailbox where it belongs. I have been using hotmail for over 15 years because of this feature, none of the others come close in my opinion. I hope this helps. Thanks.
Michael Clark 4 years ago
Actually, based on the numbers you've posted above, Yahoo should be in second place, and Hotmail should be in 3rd. Yahoo blocked correctly 59% of the spam, while Hotmail blocked 42%. You can't only use the number of messages that got into your inbox, you have to look at the number that didn't as well.
Was this study done in 2007 or 2008? It hasn't been 30 days yet since January 9th.