Who has Better Spam Protection? Yahoo, Gmail & Hotmail Tested

How I Tested:

1. On January 9th, I signed up for a free Yahoo, Hotmail, and Gmail address: woahmatt@yahoo.com, woahmatt@gmail.com, woahmatt@hotmail.com
2. Posted all three addresses on a few forums, and on my blog and made them clickable. This is one way that spambots find your email address, by crawling the web looking for clickable email addresses. I didn't see much result from this because having your email address "harvested" this way, takes time. I did this experiment for about 30 days, so I never really saw the fruits of my labor for this method.
3. Entered all three addresses in a seedy "Win a Free iPod!" website. (Believe it or not, I didn't win!) The spam REALLY starting flowing after this, starting with about one piece every couple of days, and then suddenly growing exponentially.
4. Waited 29 days.

Critera for "Winning"

If a piece of junk mail enters the junk folder, I consider that to be a success. So, whoever has the least amount of spam in the inbox, is the winner.

Yahoo Mail lost, hands down. No contest. I was surprised actually how poorly Yahoo handled spam. Sixty-two pieces of Spam accumulated in my inbox (not counting my three "welcome" emails from Yahoo), in a mere 29 days. Phishing emails, shady credit cards, you name it, this address got it.

• INBOX: 62 (not counting the three "welcome to Yahoo" emails)
• Bulk Folder: 89

Compared to Yahoo Mail, Hotmail did a fairly respectable job of keeping my inbox from being cluttered with spam. Eleven emails, minus one "welcome" email from Hotmail. Honestly, I thought that Hotmail was going to perform the worst of the three. One interesting thing is that it's junk folder only had eight emails inside.

• Inbox: 11 (not including the one "welcome to Hotmail" email)
• Junk Folder: 8

With a mere three pieces of spam in my inbox, Gmail is the winner, by far. Gmail's Spam folder had a whopping 579 emails in it.

Why are there so many more pieces of spam in my Gmail spam folder than in my other folders? Often times, mail services will off block items that they determine are undeniably spam BEFORE they even get to your email account. Gmail seems to let a lot more of them through. I'm not sure why. Maybe its a psychological thing, so you can see just how much spam Gmail is blocking, so you can feel really impressed. Well, I'm impressed anyway!

• Inbox: 3 (Not including one "welcome to Gmail" email)
• Spam folder: 580

I'm not done with my webmail spam experiment just yet. To be fair, I'm going to start marking items as "junk mail". Some mail filters need to be "trained" to work more effectively. So for the next couple of months, I'll see which of the three services will improve with "training". I'll let you know what I find.