Hotmail and Gmail are matched at blocking spam

SOFTWARE HOUSE Microsoft is crowing about the results of a survey it sponsored that found it is the best email service for blocking spam, if you ignore Google.

"We aren't surprised that Hotmail's spam protection is the best in the business," said a blog post from Microsoft that greeted the news and ignored the fact that Hotmail is only as good as Google's Gmail.

Dick Craddock, group programme manager for Hotmail said that's all good for Microsoft, its software and its users. He added that Microsoft liked the survey and its findings so much that it paid for them.

"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," he said.

"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."

It is no wonder that Microsoft coughed for the report. If you go through the statement ignoring the word Google then Hotmail looks very good indeed.

"The short story? No one did better than Hotmail," he added. "In fact, Hotmail and Gmail were dead even when dealing with spam, and both did much better than other email providers. We're confident that if you use Hotmail for your primary email, you'll get the best spam protection in the industry - no one does it better."

Although Google does it just as well. µ