E-Musings Mon Immorata

Summer madness is upon us! Hotmail emailed me ways to improve the spam detection in my account. A little deft digging reveals ther really cool (and presumably working) filters are only available for MSN users! Right. They haven't even deployed the service in India. And from past experience with Hotmail and junk mail I'm loathe to pay for the service with probably doesn't even work. I think that the new MSN Anti-junk system depends heavily on a similar module deployed in Outlook 2003 Beta that uses Baysian techniques. All of which are available for free on the Web.

My experience with junk on Hotmail has been poor. Partially because my account dates back to when the service wasn't a Microsoft offering! And have learbnt through bitter experience not to list my name in the Members Directory. And to "lock-down" my account into its most secure state -- only accept mail to my Inbox from people in my Contacts list. Any other mail is redirected to junk mail.

And the only reason I still hang on to the Hotmail account is beacuse I use instant messaging so often. Yes, I could just use a Passport ID instead (which I do too). But the hassle of keeping my contact list updated with address changes is time-consuming. Time I'd rather spent shocking chattees' with cute handles.

But if you want to read all about MSN's AntiSpam Diet, click here.

I also reccomend the Microsoft Security article "Trim 'Spam' from Your E-Mail Diet" as a good read.