Best Email Time

Tue Dec 5 15:14:06 UTC 2006

Dennis Dayman wrote:
> Ok, so the question of when is the best time to "spam" has come up. I cited
> the ReturnPath 2004 study
> (http://returnpath.biz/pdf/time_deliverability_0704.pdf), but now the
> question of when we think the Net is most congested (more likely to see
> overloaded MX servers and delivery failures?). 
> 
> Anyone have any data on such? Sorry if this question seems offtopic here,
> but I figure the question of net congestion data is appropriate.
> 
That "study" seems rather off-base, but explains why the spam patterns
have changed over time....

(I'm one of those silly people that has kept my non-worm spam that makes
it past basic filters since 1999.)

I see a lot of spam in the 2am to 8am EST frame.

Phishing seems to peak Fri-Sat instead, presumably to avoid the weekday
mitigation departments....

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%!

On the false negative side, I'm seeing 4.2% personally, 2.8% systemwide.

I conclude the parameters and filters are set a bit liberally, allowing
too much spam.