In January, Microsoft showed Gmail users how to switch over their accounts to Microsoft's Hotmail. Today, Microsoft launched another volley in its war with Google's Gmail. In a new post on the Windows Live blog, Microsoft said its own research, combined with a third party study, show that Hotmail offers the best spam protection of any email service.
The third party study came from Cascade Insights. The company ran a similar study back in 2009, where it said that Gmail had the best spam protection. In the new report, Cascade Insights said that it created email addresses for Hotmail, Gmail and Yahoo Mail and posted those address on Facebook pages. blog sites and other placed on the Internet. The group also signed up for a number of web-based services with those email addresses.
The final results, which were conducted over five weeks, were that the Hotmail email addresses had spam 48.57 percent of the time , just slightly better than Gmail which had spam mail 48.88 percent of the time.
Yahoo Mail was a distant third with 58.33 percent of spam mail in the study's email accounts. In an article at the New York Times web site reporting on the study results, a representative from Yahoo disputed the methodology behind the study.
Microsoft says that its own research confirms that spam showing up in a Hotmail inbox has been greatly reduced over the past few years since the company has been implementing its SmartScreen technology. It now claims that an average Hotmail account now has spam email showing up just 3 percent of the time in the inbox.
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