I first reported on free email in March of 1997 in Free Web-Based Email. A lot has changed since then. The best of these services are now very reliable and offer a wealth of features. One of the most popular services, MSN Hotmail has now added a fantastic bulk email filtering feature.
I have a Hotmail account that I opened shortly after the service started and I've used it primarily for times when I didn't want my main email address exposed to potential spammers. As a result, my Hotmail address has ended up on many bulk email lists. I could cancel it and open another, but I'm sort of partial to the address I chose.
I have been dealing with the bulk email in my Hotmail account by simply deleting it every time I open my inbox. It's a pain, but I really had no other choice. At least not until I tried the new bulk email feature that Hotmail has added.
If you turn on the new feature, email that is sent to a large list of people is sent to the bulk mail folder instead of to your inbox. The result, I have found, is an almost spam free Hotmail inbox.
The reason this method works so well is that almost all spam is bulk email that is sent to a large hidden list of recipients. The new Hotmail feature detects this and pre sorts your email. I have seen a few spam messages make it to the inbox, but I estimate it is less than one percent of the total spam
The one drawback to Hotmail's bulk email filter is that it can also flag some legitimate messages and dump them into the bulk email folder. This is because many newsletters that you may have subscribed too are sent as bulk mail. Hotmail has provided an easy way to fix this, as you can flag messages as not being bulk email and in the future all email from that address is delivered to your inbox.
Another nice feature Hotmail has added is that you can flag spam and tell Hotmail to block all future email from that address. This may or may not be very effective in stopping the spam since spammers often change addresses to prevent this. It is, however very easy to mark all the messages in your bulk email folder and block them, so I do it anyway. In less than two weeks I had 120 addresses in my blocked list.
Hotmail has made a great stride in the free Web based email realm with this new feature, but since the Net moves at the speed of light I expect the majority of the big free email providers will follow soon with their own version of this feature. Finally it looks like we may be gaining the advantage over the evil spam lords.
You can visit Hotmail.com, and try out the bulk email feature with your own account. You may also want to check out the About.com Email Site to learn just about anything there is to know about email.