Ask Hotmail users about their email accounts and most likely they will gripe how impossible it is to eliminate spam.
Microsoft confirmed on Friday that its free Hotmail email services were restored for up to 330,000 users who could not access their accounts for over a week because of a hardware glitch.
Still, these users' woes haven't ended. They simply joined the other 66 million Hotmail users who, despite having filters, sift through mounds of electronic junk mail daily.
"I haven't experienced the latest Hotmail outages," said Pauline Mang, a marketing consultant in Ontario. "But I, like a lot of other people -- because their Hotmail addresses are included as CC's on the messages I get -- am the unhappy recipient of a lot of weird spam. It comes into my inbox, despite the bulk mail filters being applied, without any sender name, and without any originating ISP that I can figure out."
Despite having 30 filters in place, "Scott" a commercial real estate broker in the Midwest, gets six to 10 pieces of junk mail in his Hotmail account each day. He said spammers slip through the filters by misspelling keywords meant to be filtered.
"I have email accounts with Earthlink, Netscape, and Hotmail," said Scott, who feared that Hotmail would retaliate by confiscating his account if he gave his last name. "Hotmail is the only one I receive spam on."
The Hotmail customer service telephone line has been busy since Monday. But MSN product manager Sarah Lefko disputed claims that Hotmail users are receiving unwanted solicitations even with filters in place.
"MSN has been very aggressive and proactive in protecting our MSN Hotmail users from spam," she said. "At the server, we stop incoming messages from known spam sources. At the client (level), we allow individual users to protect themselves against spam by giving them the opportunity to block messages from individual senders and by sending spam email messages to a special bulk mail folder."
Advertisements on how to obtain fake driver's licenses, phony college degrees, vacation packages, job training, vitamins online, and "how to send emails to thousands anonymously," are samples of the spam mail Scott receives.
"I use all of the filters, and primarily use keywords contained in the heading of the email, for example 'job,' 'diploma,'" Scott said. "The filters have worked if that key word is present, and then the message is sent to the 'trash' folder. The reason the spam filters aren't effective is that the spam coming through appears to be sent 'in bulk,' and changed daily with words deliberately spelled incorrectly like 'colege' or 'lisence.'"
One of the weird messages Mang constantly receives is from a Miami-based company called the "University Degree Program," which purportedly sells college degrees and requires no "tests, classes, books, or interviews." The message lists 307 user names, all of which include "mang."
"I mentioned to the abuse@hotmail.com people that it looked like someone had sold all their email addresses to someone, or snagged them from somewhere," Mang said. "My level of trust with my Hotmail account is absolutely nil at this point. I've gradually diverted all my mail from the account over time, and it gets filled up with spam instead."
Scott in an email asked Hotmail support why his account is flooded with spam, but he has yet to receive an answer.
Other email service providers say there is no sure way to keep out all unsolicited material.
Though Microsoft said it doesn't sell its email lists to advertisers, competing email service providers say it is possible that Hotmail sells its email lists to third parties or spammers have figured a way around its spam guard.
Christopher Duxler, co-founder and managing director of MailStart.com, said when users sign up for its free services, they fill out a profile and check off whether they want to receive information from the company. He said the company does not sell users' email addresses, but people who opt in are added to an advertising distribution list.
"If they opt out, they are not penalized, and if they opt in we're giving them an additional 10 megabytes of file storage," Duxler said. "What they (users) want is advertising and information most relevant to them."
MailStart, which receives 900,000 unique visits a month, allows users who already have email accounts to access them from the Web. Free mail accounts are offered to 130,000 users through another company MailStart owns called WebBox.com.
MailStart, Earthlink, and free email ISPs Yahoo and Altavista would not divulge specific information on their spam guards because they did not want to fall victim to spammers.
But a Yahoo spokesman said Yahoo Mail's spam-guard tool automatically detects junk and directs it to a bulk mail folder, so users have a choice of whether they want to read unsolicited mail. He said the company does not send advertisements to users without their permission.
Altavista also shares an "opt in" policy, to give users the choice of whether they want to receive unsolicited material.
"We hold their privacy in the highest respect," said Altavista spokesman Jim Shissler.
Earthlink, which charges fees for its Internet services, guards against spam by limiting the number of users listed on the "cc" prompt. The company touts 400,000 email users and has a policy against selling account information to any third party.
