So one week after I started the Google Mail (Gmail) spam challenge I have a total count of 111 spam messages. Of which only 4 made it to my inbox.
This is an excellent example of how Gmail has surpassed other free email providers in quality of service to their customers. If you want to contrast that to my Hotmail account, I received about 75 spam messages in my junk folder, where 25 or more made it to my inbox. With Hotmail the same message, with the exact same content, but from a different address will make it to your inbox. This is not so with Gmail.
One thing I did discover during the week was that my Computer Science email account was not properly forwarding messages to my Gmail. As I previously mentioned I had forwarded a few of my email account to my Gmail. This is an attempt to integrate all my correspondence to one system. It seems however, that my CS mail is not working. I’ll have to look further in to this when I resume my duties at The Commons this week.
Given the different accounts forwarding to your GMail and Hotmail accounts, I question the validity of this experiment.
But when you consider that the Gmail filters were dealing with an additional 3 accounts forwarding to it, and Hotmail was not, it highlights the power of the Gmail filters. Gmail, with the additional load, was still able to block more spam than Hotmail which had NO accounts forwarding to it.
Fair enough. It was my fault, I misread the post. I was thinking it was a spam experiment. Clearly, in that case, you would need a control, likely 2 new accounts, one each from Hotmail and Gmail. However, you simply set out to see whether GMail would stop a lot of spam. So I must ask, what has this proven that hasn’t been stated since GMail came to be?
Sure it has been stated a million and one times in the blogosphere but it is also nice to see the results first hand.
What’s next, the "will the sun come up tomorrow challenge"? 😉