North American Network Operators Group
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Re: Best Email Time

  • From: Kee Hinckley
  • Date: Tue Dec 05 12:11:00 2006 
On Dec 5, 2006, at 10:14 AM, William Allen Simpson wrote:
The "study" says that "nearly 20 percent of email does not get delivered to
the inbox as intended, largely because it gets mistaken as spam."

That's utter hogwash. My Mail Mailguard statistics this year show that for
me personally, only 0.1% of messages are false positives! Systemwide,
it's only 0.6%!
My experience with running an anti-spam service is that 20% is probably not far off for non-technical end-users. I might put it closer at 10%, but it's certainly larger than you would expect. First of all, they never check the stuff that gets dumped into the spam folder in their app or service--so the filters don't get fine tuned. Secondly, they ignore legit bounces (heck, gmail flags all bounces as spam). Thirdly, they tend to delete anything from anyone they don't recognize--that particularly includes receipts for stuff they bought online, and subscriptions that they knowingly or unknowingly signed up for.

The main point is that even if they've got a spam filter with a low false positive rate, that doesn't mean all legit mail gets "through".

Speaking of bounces. For the past month or so I've been getting daily spam bounce-backs that are from lists very similar to those that I actually subscribe to (i.e. similar technical content). I'm beginning to wonder if the spammers aren't trying to get through to mailing lists that authenticate based on sender email address.