Free WebMail Spam and Storage Battles
Contributed by AlexTheBeast 
July 16, 2004 
Tagged: Internet
Experiment detailing the filtering ability and storage provided by the dominate free webmail providers.
All of the big guns in the free webmail world are stressing how much better one is over the other. However, only a few factors really matter. The most important of them all is spam blocking. I have created an experiment where I send a known quanity of spam and good emails to these free email accounts.
With gmail ripping onto the scene all the big boys will be playing catch up soon with the amount of email storage provided.
| Free Webmail Provider | Percentage Blocked | False Identifications | Space Provided |
|---|---|---|---|
| gmail (google) | 84% | 0 | 1000 MB |
| Yahoo | 82% | 0 | 100 MB |
| Lycos (filter high) | 34% | 0 | 5 MB |
| Excite (filter high) | 82% | 10% | 3 MB |
| Hotmail (Enhanced filter) | 100% | 100% | 2 MB |
Over these two weeks, I actually felt that yahoo and gmail did the best jobs. Excite dumped one non-spam message but otherwise did fine. The filter at lycos is obviously very poor.
Hotmail believed every message that entered the account was spam. Oddly, many of the messages that were received by the other accounts did not appear anywhere in hotmail. My theory is that hotmail blocks a lot of obvious spam and deletes it before even sorting it.