Have you been seeing more spam than usual in Hotmail for July?

If so then this might be the explanation you’ve been looking for, kindly provided by the Windows Live Mail Desktop Beta Product Support Blog:

July was an interesting month if you keep a close eye and count on junk mail you receive.

I got notes on the blog and personally from many of you who were alarmed about what you perceived as a loosening of our pretty intense anti-spam controls, so I wanted to post a general message to everyone about some testing we recently did.

We employ a ton of different technologies to make sure you only receive the messages you want and expect to receive. At times, like this July, we wanted to test different pieces of technologies in different orders (spice up the mix) and using different thresholds, because we thought there was a good chance to actually improve deliverability and reduce spam even more than we already were. Clearly, some of the tests we ran let more spam into some inboxes and junk mail folders for several days.

It’s funny, because many of you who wrote in totally understood and even appreciated the fact that we’re trying new ideas in the fight against spam, even if it caused you some short-term pain! But several of you also asked why we had to do these tests on live Hotmail, knowing there was a risk of increasing the junk mail some of you received.

The challenge with testing creative anti-spam solutions is that you have to have real, live spammers (or, more precisely, their spam machines) to deal with, and billions of messages to run against to see if your ideas can scale. So we have to do it live.

What’d we learn? A lot.  I can’t share the all the details…but I can tell you the three things I got from this experience:

• In addition to the amazing suite of technologies we already employ, we need more solutions that let us react in real-time
• We need to get better at letting you help us identify junk mail, and we need to give you more effective solutions for managing your mail, including the way you subscribe to and unsubscribe from newsletters, campaigns and catalogues (Windows Live Mail has some really cool features, and more coming)
• Finally, I need to do a better job of giving you some advance notice when we plan events like this. It’s hard a balance to strike, because every piece of advance information I provide to our customers is advance information I’m giving to spammers as well. But I promise to share the information I can – if and when we do more testing. 

Lastly even though we re-set all our services back to their previous levels earlier this week it’s probably going to take a few more days before you really feel like your inbox and junk mail folder are back to normal. With billions of messages traveling across thousands of servers in the Hotmail universe, changes like this take time to take full effect.

Thanks a lot for your patience and especially for your words of encouragement. If this post has encouraged you to think about managing your mail better, log into Windows Live Mail, click Help in the upper right-hand corner and enter junk into the Search Box. You’ll find several helpful articles.