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.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
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.
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.