Related Resources • Avoiding Junk Email • Hotmail Banishes Bulk Email

Elsewhere on the Web • Hotmail

If you register for freebies, sweepstakes or anything on the Web, you need a good "junk" email account. Unless you read (and trust) the privacy policy on every site you give your email address to, you do not want to use your primary email address. You can read more about this in another article -- Avoiding Junk Email.

You could use any free email service, but the best solution is to use one that allows you to find the email you want to receive. Many free offers and almost all sweepstakes, require an email address to notify you or confirm eligibility. If you use an email account that doesn't do a good job of filtering spam, you may miss an important message among all the clutter.

Hotmail has had pretty good bulk email blocking for a while now. They have recently improved the spam fighting features. If you setup the options for the strongest junk filtering, you can enjoy an almost spam free account.

I have a Hotmail account that I have used as my junk account since early 1997. I have registered for thousands of free services, free offers and other miscellaneous websites. I have used the same Hotmail account for most of them. I recently collected all my email for one week and analyzed it to see how well the new Hotmail spam filtering worked.

In one week I had 156 messages. 122 of them went straight to the junk email folder. I reviewed these to see if anything I wanted was there. All 122 were pure spam. I clicked "empty folder" and was rid of the lot of them. There were 34 messages which made it through to my inbox. Six of those were confirmations or passwords I was expecting for recent registrations. 27 were "opt-in" email lists that I had not bothered to cancel. One message was spam mail that managed to slip through.

Your experiences my vary, but as far as I am concerned, Hotmail is an ideal junk account for a freebies freak like me.

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