Hotmail has come a long way in spam protection and is now among the best in the industry in keeping spam out of your inbox. Our own internal metrics, customer feedback, and even a recent third-party report confirms that no mail service offers better protection than Hotmail. You can read all about it in the Gadgetwise column in the New York Times.
Our years of improvements in Hotmail?s SmartScreen technology have led to record low rates of spam in the inbox (SITI), and our customers can tell the difference. We?ve driven SITI down below 3% for a typical Hotmail inbox, and, more importantly, we?ve kept the number there.
Beyond the metrics
Our metrics tell us that we?re doing a good job, and we?re pleased with the progress. But let?s look beyond metrics for a moment. Keeping your inbox clean is about three things, and Hotmail does a great job on all three:
- Driving true SITI down as low as possible
We?ve recently lowered true SITI an additional 25% since our last update. We?re getting great results, and we just keep improving. - Reducing clutter and graymail
We automatically identify newsletters and give our customers powerful tools for getting through their Inbox faster, including one-click filters to see only the mail you want. - Reduce obvious spam in the Junk folder
Sure, it?s great to keep spam out of the inbox, but you still need to visit your Junk folder every now and then to make sure you haven?t missed something important. Hotmail not only keeps more spam out of your inbox, it keeps obvious spam out of your Junk folder to make this job easier. In fact, our recent efforts have reduced the size of our customers? Junk folders by more than 50% - that?s about a half a billion fewer pure spam messages per day.
Our customers can tell the difference
Metrics are great, but what we really care about is hearing from our customers about their own experiences with Hotmail. We have several ways to get customer feedback:
Customer support: Complaints related to spam, including phishing, junk and malware, have dropped by over 40% over the past year.
Direct customer feedback: Hotmail includes a feedback link, which we call ?voice of the customer? or VOTC. Our voice of the customer data gives us incredibly valuable feedback and verbatim comments from you on what?s going well and what isn?t. We take this feedback seriously: members of the development team read this feedback every day and spend time categorizing it, finding patterns and trends, and using it to make product improvments. The total number of complaints related to spam has shrunk by over 50% over the past two years. This would be a great result by itself, but it?s even more remarkable when you consider that our overall feedback volume has been steadily increasing.
We?ve seen really spectacular progress in certain areas around spam management. For example, complaints about managing safe and blocked sender lists has dropped to near zero. Questions like ?why did my mail end up where it did?? have similarly dropped to near zero. Complaints around ?repeat spam? have been cut in half ? from 35% down to 17% of complaint volume.
While we?re happy with the results, we know that there are still areas to improve. For example, we still see feedback on phishing attacks.
In-product telemetry: We know that customers who use Hotmail regularly (for example, as their primary email) see lower than average SITI due to our investments in personalization of our spam filtering. Put simply: the more you use Hotmail, the better the experience gets.
An independent study confirms it: no one beats Hotmail
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. 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.
The short story? No one did better than Hotmail. In fact, Hotmail and Gmail were dead even when dealing with spam, and both did much better than other email providers.
The methodology defined by Cascade Insights was straightforward and consistent across email providers. It?s important to note that this was just one study which used a particular methodology, and that your own results may vary. But 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.
Give us a try
If you?re already using Hotmail, we want to hear from you. You can use the Feedback link in Hotmail to let us know about your own spam experience.
If you haven?t tried us out in a while, take a look. If you have a Hotmail account that you haven?t been using, you may see some accumulation of mail you don?t want. Some of it might be old spam, and some might be graymail. (That?s legitimate email that you just don?t want, like newsletters or daily deals you?re no longer interested in. We?ll have more on that subject soon.) We recommend using Sweep to clean up your Inbox, then using Hotmail as your primary email for a while to get the benefit of our improvements, especially what we?ve done with personalization. Once you start using your account again, you should see very little spam on an ongoing basis.
We?re working hard to keep spam out of your inbox, and we hope you like the results. As always, thanks for using Hotmail.
Dick Craddock
Group Program Manager, Hotmail
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