Best Email Time

Tue Dec 5 16:44:45 UTC 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.