Gmail doesn't really let me block much spam manually which is annoying (I would rather it just not show at all, if It comes from a block list I made).

But it at least catches nearly 100% of spam and puts it right into the spam box, so it is good enough.

It'd just be nice to make up a reasonable sized list of addresses and such to block and not display entirely.

I've had problems with Hotmail that makes me choose Gmail in a heartbeat. The first is that hotmail looks like it controls spam better, but in reality, it just has more false positives. I'd prefer the occasional spam in my inbox to the one lost important email in my spambox.

Also, GMail has gmail for domains, which lets me use gmail as my mailserver (after the maildir invalid issues we were having here on asta I got off my ass and set it up).

Yup - nothing to beat the Google Apps for Your Domain service. As long as you've got your own domain - this service is a must use. Besides as ethergeek pointed out.. I've never seen Gmail producing a false positive and landing one of my important mails into the spambox... so hats off to Gmail. I've never really relied on the mail service provided here - don't get me wrong.. I don't doubt it's reliability.. but I hate the silly / clumsy webmail interface of SquirrelMail / Horde. Ever since I found out about GoogleApps (about an year and half back) - I switched over immediately... and never regretted yet

Same here... using gmail domains has made things much easier, and i definitely like gmail's spam filters. I have a personal address and an address used for signing up for web stuff, which gets a lot of spam. I figure about 5 per day to my personal, and 200 to my bulk address. of those, maybe twice i've gotten spam through. and on my bulkmail, probably one or two a week get through. but since it filters out the other 1500, i think it does a pretty good job.

I also have been using Gmail since June 2005, before I got an invite for Gmail, I used hotmail, and for me at least at the time, the Gmail spam filter was better, but I'm not sure now, because I only use my Gmail account. I still get around 10-20 spam emails a day, but I could care less because non of it shows in my inbox, it goes straight to the spam folder.

ATM I have Only 2333 spam messages in my gmail bulk mail folder - this is in a 30 day period as I never touch or clean the folder. I couldn't care less how much was in it, I don't pay attention to it anymore. It used to be around 5k in October I guess so it toned down a bit.

Around october/nov I also used to have about 5 messages land in my inbox a month. I haven't seen one in my inbox in february - so I'm satisfied. I've definitely seen improvement and for me it reached a perfect status.

One can hardly blame either hotmail or gmail's management for the amount of spam mails you get. I don't think it's relevant to your provider.
What makes a good spam filter for me is:

• No spam messages hit your inbox
• Messages you need always land in inbox

I've seen hotmail lack on the second point - many forum mails/registration e-mails got sent to bulk mail when I still used hotmail.
@Topic author: Do you still have this as hotmail? If so, you should reconsider the statement you made int he subject title.

Gosh, I have so many email addresses everywhere. >.< I have accounts with AOL, Yahoo!, Hotmail, and GMail. I like Yahoo! best as it filters spam pretty well, is reliable, and has a nice inbox quota. Furthermore, with that same account, you can access all the other Yahoo! features. That's a pretty good deal, in my opinion.

And Hotmail! I can't believe that you say that it filters spam well. Its filter works by blocking everyone but your address book contacts out. I find this insanely annoying, because some people who aren't my contacts have to send me emails too! I don't like Hotmail. At all. It takes too long to load. The only reason I have that account is to use Messenger.

I haven't really used GMail that much; by the time I got an account there, I was fully hooked onto Yahoo! But I like GMail for their simple interface; I like things that load fast, because my connection's really slow. I haven't had a chance to test GMail's spam filters though.

I rarely use my AOL address, but sometimes, the spam filter really doesn't work and spam messages end up in my inbox. One of the features I like about it (and wish that all other email services had) is the unsend feature, which allows a user to take back an email he or she sent, if the recipient hasn't opened it yet. Now that is an awesome feature.

So I think I strayed off the topic a bit, but I think that GMail controls spam better, since Hotmail just blocks everything but the chain letters your friends sends you anyways.

Serena

It all depends on personal views and choice. But I'd say Gmail has showed several security threats like revealing your contacts to others, eventhough this has been fixed it does pose many new security and privacy concerns. But such has not been faced in Microsoft Hotmail rechristined as Microsoft Live Hotmail.

I've switched from hotmail to yahoo, and from yahoo eventually to Gmail and I'm never going back to anything. For now, at least... Gmail has proven itself not only to be much faster and reliable, to me, but also a lot more protective. I've never received any spam in my inbox. It's promptly kicked into the spam folder. All the other functions like the AJAX based chat, the way it collects email "conversations", the automatic email address auto-fill etc... are a bliss for someone who has to mail a whole lot (like myself).

Whereas my hotmail would be flooded with SPAM, but I eventually started using it as my spam mail. You know, when you need to confirm a subscription or whatever. The spam would be delivered right into my inbox EVEN when I marked it as spam. Yahoo did a slightly better job.

The only plus hotmail and yahoo have over gmail, is the fact that it has filter and subfolder to use. Unless I'm missing something or overlooking something here, Gmail doesn't have this...

Perhaps this is the key behind their brilliant spam-control mechanisms. Not letting users introduce inaccurate data to the spam-filters, it enables the system to see what kind of mails are really "spam", and not just "unwanted". If this is the only price for not having any of my important mails being thrown into the spam bin, I'm more than happy to pay it.



With domains being so cheap lately, and the ease of setting up the google apps services, I switched all my mail to them. The domain thing does not give as much space per account as the regular version, but do we really need that much anyway (especially that you can have quite a number of accounts)?



You can set up gmail to retrieve your mail from all those account. That way you use the spam filters on the original account and the gmail one. And you remain with only one to monitor.



Indeed, it doesn't have folders, but it has tags, which makes mail management even more powerful. You can set the filters up so they tag mails with tags of your choice. It's very similar to what Opera browser's e-mail client is based on. Very handy, check that out!

This post has been edited by xerxes: Jun 16 2007, 01:33 PM