Yahoo and Hotmail United in Battle Against Spam

We hate spam!

Spam can cause anything from a minor annoyance to a complete and utter nightmarish clog in your inbox, full of link peppered messages and pop-ups that can potentially lead you down the garden path to a nasty lurking virus. Both UK and US anti-spam regulations have been criticized in the past for being not hard enough. But thanks to our friendly neighbour-hood email providers they don’t have to be.

While they are both well hardened battle foes, they have a common enemy in the shape of the legendary Spam Beast. This notoriously evil demon has been causing havoc for many years but it seems this ongoing battle is perhaps at last being won by the email providers.

Hotmail

With Window’s Live Hotmail currently undergoing an overhaul, mostly to keep up with Google Mail, there has been some significantly improved anti-spam lube slipped in there too.

SmartScreen – is a technology which works to block, prevent and deter spammers from attacking Hotmail users. It works by detecting which URLs are bad, assigning them a probability-of-nastiness rating and decides whether to block it or not. It doesn’t stop there though; it tracks down the IP of the computers address with the evil domain and marks them as bad and even locates other IP blocks in the area and can block them too. Clever stuff. Hotmail aims to make it too hard and too expensive for the bad guys to get there stuff in your face. SmartScreen makes your reputation online as important as it is on the street and after a number of bad bits of feedback your evil plan of spam burger selling, could be at an end. Along with some further personalized spam filters Hotmail is looking a bit more robust at last.

Yahoo

Not to be outdone by Hotmail, or by the spam guys. Yahoo has recently highlighted an independent study conducted by The Fraunhofer Institute which shows that its users receive almost 40% less spam than Hotmail and nearly 55% less than Gmail:

“Customers of the email service Yahoo get the few unwanted emails. Only scarcely behind it Microsoft places its service Hotmail. To this result the institute for Fraunhofer comes for safe information technology (SIT) in its recent study. The Institute examined, how strongly one is as a customer of the most popular German free email services affected by unwanted advertisement. Google landed at place three, and the worst evaluations received the offers from WEB.de and GMX. “

The whole report is in German but if you want to translate it, you can see it here.

Like Hotmail, Yahoo is utilizing a developing new generation of intelligent anti-spam and filtering tools to combat an increasingly intelligent spam underworld. It is developing a broader knowledge base of raw data full of information on spam scoundrels in order to keep one step ahead of the wave.

Have you been effected by spam? Tell us about it. We have big clever shoulders to cry on.

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