SpamCop, Yahoo & Gmail Spam Filtering Stats: Jan 16, 2006

by Danny Sullivan on January 17, 2006

in Email

Here’s the latest installment in my series on how SpamCop, Gmail & Yahoo handle
email spam. For previous posts on this topic, see my
Email category. Below is the summary
of mail received yesterday from around
10:30am Monday, Jan. 16 through the same time Tuesday, January 18, an entire
day. SpamCop is still the leader, though Gmail greatly closed the gap. Mail was
substantially down due to the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday in the US.
Tomorrow, I’ll report one last time on scores without whitelists at Yahoo and
Google. Then for the rest of the week, I’ll start whitelisting false matches to
see if that reduces false match rates.

Service

Yahoo

Gmail

SpamCop

Inbox

469

217

180

Spam

116

370

402

False Match

6

0

1

Total Mail

591

587

583

% Spam Caught

20%

63%

69%

% False Match

5%

0.0%

0.2%

Spam

122

370

403

What do the figures on the chart mean? See this
page.

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{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }

1 kalenj January 17, 2006 at 11:14 pm

Danny,
Thanks for doing this side by side comparison. Very useful! I totally LOVE gmail, but couple things I don’t like about spam handling:
* Sometimes it silently marks something as spam, doesn’t put in spam folder, doesn’t send bounce message or anything. And on false positives.
* I’d REALLY love to be able to disable sometimes - especially since filters work so well.
Thought I’d gripe to you, since you’re apparently a spam pro.

2 Scramblejams November 6, 2006 at 6:37 am

Hi Danny, very informative, except for a couple of things. This chart is confusing since you’ve got two rows labelled “Spam” with slightly different numbers, but I suppose that was just a thinko, as it were. What would have been very enlightening, though, would be to know how many false negatives each had. That SpamCop is the best of the three is apparent, but without knowing how what percentage of your post-filtering inbox consisted of undetected spam, I don’t know how good it really is.

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