Microsoft is a remarkable company. When you run the world’s biggest internet mail operation, the default option for most high school students, when you’re being threatened by companies that make better stuff but don’t have your head start, it’s not that difficult to respond to competitive threats.
For instance a while back hotmail had just a few megs of storage. Then gmail came along and blew everyone out of the water with firstly a gig and now more space to store your stuff. So Microsoft matched gmail on that score – or more or less.
And if you’re the biggest internet mail operation you can have the world’s best spam checker. Just identify suspects and then see if they’re being sent to people who are normally not on the same cc mailing lists. The quality of the online spamchecker is one of the reasons I love gmail.
I have a hotmail account which I no longer access much, but I know people on the MSN IM so I occasionally log in on their newly facelifted ‘live windows’ service and it invariably tells me that I’ve got a few more emails each time I log in, and since I don’t use the email regularly I ignore them and know that they’re spam.
Anyway I clicked to look at the 22 emails I had this evening. All spam.
Still it must be pretty hard for Microsoft’s software to tell that emails with subjects like ‘up the ass’, and ‘Asian cocksucker’ are spam emails. I don’t know about you but I’m always sending emails like that around.
In case you’re thinking I’m looking at the junk intray – there are apparently 16 emails in there that the spam checker caught. I wonder what they say? Call me old fashioned but I reckon the subject ‘deep anal fucking’ ought to raise a few suspicions.
Shalom Nicholas, Shalom.
How come I never get spam with all those porn sites. Damn! How does one get a spam list?
JC, just make sure your email address appears online, and preferably with a mailto: link just to make it obvious. They will find you.
“wilmer waldron”, a benign enough sounding name if ever there was one, the contents of his? her? mind, possibly not so.
Outlook is the standard email platform for whole of government in Victoria. For a while I played with the Junk email features. Conclusion? A total waste of time and worse than useless. Misses all the obvious ones and routinely snares emails you’ve been waiting on. Much simpler and quicker to just delete them as they are. Gmail does the best job – close to 100% effective.
Spam filters on my Government workstation seem to function – although the occasional (non-obscene) item gets through. The filters on Explorer also work. Rather too well. But none of the settings can be changed by the regular user. Perhaps fair enough, on the browser – but when spam does come in to my mailbox I have no way of blocking that sender. Nor can I actually access the ‘junk mail’ folder – which means I can’t even check to make sure real mail isn’t getting shunted aside. Since I get a lot of official stuff from overseas, this can be a real problem.
I suppose all this can be attributed to a paranoid government, rather than the manifold failings of Microsloth.
Out in the real world, though, the spam continues. Despite having been on the ‘Do not mail’ and ‘Do not contact’ registers from almost the day they were set up, the occasional inconsiderate bastard still crops up (although they do seem to be avoiding the dinner hour, now. You have to wonder how profitable it can be for telemarketers to ring many many empty houses in the middle of the day.). Yesterday I came home to the dreaded prize letter from Readers Digest. It included my full name and title, which they could only have obtained by getting my details, by fair means or foul, from one of the other services or subscriptions I have paid for with my credit card – and for which I have, without exception, indicated that I do not want my details passed on to third parties.
The Government can (reluctantly) set up as many registers (or internet filters) as it likes, but they’re never going to find away around people willing to pass on confidential info for money.
Meanwhile, I have to deal with the horror that is Readers Digest. The people who never never never let you drop off their radar.
Why blame the carrier rather than the creators and enablers?
I found returning the mail with “Deceased” scrawled across the envelope slowed them down a bit.
Brendan,
I’m very sorry. Those people who send spam. They really are very very bad aren’t they. My goodness I think they are. Microsoft is not as bad as them.
Nicholas,
Ta, thanks. That was easy wasn’t it?
[…] Nicholas from Club Troppo has the perfect ad for why you don’t want to use Hotmail: Microsoft . . . tell me I’m missing something . . . please. […]