Gmail slashes spam FPs

Hotmail lagging behind on mislabelled ham.

‘Email marketing’ firm

Lyris

has released a study of spam false positive filtering, showing a general downward trend in falsely blocked email. The survey was performed by subscribing to large numbers of valid, fully legal opt-in email newsletters and alert systems, then measuring how many failed to make it through to inboxes.

The most startling outcome is a major reduction in filtered ham by

Google

‘s

Gmail

webmail service, from a huge freak peak of 44% in the previous quarter to a mere 2.97%.

Microsoft

-operated

Hotmail

lags behind, with 18.2%, down slightly from 23% the previous quarter.

ISPs were also measured, and European providers appear to be offering much better anti-spam services than their US counterparts, filtering less than 0.1% of the opt-in mails compared to over 3% in the US.

A

Lyris

press release is

here

. The report is available in full (in PDF format)

here

.

Posted on 03 October 2006 by

Virus Bulletin