Another popular service with a bad spam reputation is Microsoft's Hotmail (free). Messages pass through servers running Brightmail's spam protection before they arrive on the Hotmail servers. If Brightmail decides the mail is spam, it's immediately deleted and the user never sees the message. Still, an amazing amount of spam continues to get through. At this point, Hotmail's built-in filtering mechanism tries to determine whether incoming mail is spam and either deletes it or moves it to your Junk Mail folder, where it is emptied roughly every seven days, depending on your settings. The $19.95-per-year Hotmail Extra Storage adds space for mail and spam but has no capabilities for spam blocking beyond what comes with the free account.

Hotmail gives you some control over the handling of spam. By default it filters only obvious junk mail, which explains why so much gets through to the in-box by default. By selecting Enhanced, you can tell Hotmail to become more aggressive. We still aren't impressed with its performance, however. One certain way to eliminate spam in Hotmail is to use Exclusive mode, in which only messages from those in your Contacts list or a separate safe list are let through. This might make sense for a carefully monitored child's account, but will probably annoy adults.

When Hotmail falsely classifies a message as spam, you can click the link "This is not junk mail" to add the user or the domain to your whitelist. We do like that Hotmail has an explicit way to let through specific mailing lists that come to a particular address. And you can also manually define filters to delete messages or move them to a folder based on the sender or the contents of the subject line.