Recently I read a most interesting article online about Hotmail. It was written and researched by an experienced publishing executive, Hal Licino. As long as Hotmail has existed, Hal has always suspected that Microsoft’s web-based email service is not exactly reliable for delivering email attachments.

Full disclosure: I have never been a fan of Hotmail. The user interface is mediocre, the spam filtering isn’t great, and I find the website rather cumbersome. I find Gmail far superior in almost every way.

As for the Hotmail article, the author decided he would conduct a series of independent tests to determine how faulty the Hotmail service was with respect to delivering attachments. The results were astonishingly unacceptable.

To address as many variables as possible, Hal set up two different Hotmail accounts, and used two separate ‘regular’ ISP email accounts. He sent emails with attachments both from, and to, each email address, using every possible combination. To allow for different traffic patterns, messages were sent at different times throughout the day on weekdays, and at two different times on the weekend. One of the ‘regular’ ISP accounts was situated in the U.S., and the other in Canada. These variables were used to ensure the test was impartial and fair.

With every possible emailing situation, Hotmail actually lost between 59 and 81 percent of the attachments! Yes, you read correctly: the best performance from Hotmail was actually delivering 41% on the tested attached messages. These numbers are not at all promising, to say the least. Hotmail may not be terrible for personal use, but relying on it for any business purposes would be risky.

I am always surprised at how many Hotmail users there are. Sure, it’s been around significantly longer than Gmail, but if you weren’t aware of it, Gmail is now available for everyone. If you haven’t used it yet, give it a try. In my honest opinion, it blows Hotmail away.

From a security perspective, Gmail is superior to Hotmail because it in fact properly addresses two of the three building blocks of computer security that Hotmail does not. The three most important elements of computer security are availability, integrity and confidentiality. In not being able to successfully deliver attachments, Hotmail is failing on data availability and data integrity.

I’ve been using Gmail for over four years now and have not once missed an attachment that was sent to me. Plus, Gmail employs the best spam filter I have ever seen. This may sound like a big advertisement for Google, but it’s not. Google is by no means completely harmless when it comes to security issues—especially with regards to privacy. Google is likely the world’s largest data harvester, and their Gmail application is no exception.

Who knows what information Google has on all of us? But that’s another discussion altogether. Perhaps a future article. Regardless, I’ll take Gmail over Hotmail any day.