[93578] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: Best Email Time
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Kee Hinckley)
Tue Dec 5 12:02:22 2006
In-Reply-To: <45758CBE.4080308@gmail.com>
Cc: nanog@merit.edu
From: Kee Hinckley <nazgul@somewhere.com>
Date: Tue, 5 Dec 2006 11:44:45 -0500
To: William Allen Simpson <william.allen.simpson@gmail.com>
Errors-To: owner-nanog@merit.edu
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.
