Craig Newark of Craigslist.org fame has this disturbing post about how free e-mail service providers like Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo! and others lose between 1 to 2% of e-mail sent to you.
They keep forgetting to tell you, but… if you’re using one of the big, free, email servers, email sent to you is not guaranteed to be delivered. Engineers from some of them tell me that one or two per cent of email will not get to you, which might be problematic if you’re running a business of some sort, etc. This is not a matter of bad spam filtering, just the underlying technology. I guess, for free, not bad… but it’s been suggested that I get the word out so you know.
1 -2% is a lot of missed messages if it has to deal with sales or business. Not good.
Technorati Tags : e-mail, Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo!
That’s not very distressing, since 90% of email on the Internet [or more in my opinion] is spam. Statisticly it’s unlikely they’ll lose a legit message.
That’s a bad use of statistics, saskboy. Unless you assume they’re more likely to lose spam than legitimate email, they’ll be losing 1 – 2% of your legitimate email.
Granted, given your 90% figure as accurate, they’ll lose 9 spam for each legitimate email they lose, but that’s still a problem.
It’s a problem only if the sender assumes that the message was received without checking it was. Even in the real world, I’d say that about 1% of letters/packages don’t get delivered, possibly a higher amount. email have never been a guaranteed secure or reliable form of message passing, it’s just the best thing we’ve got for long documents to be sent in [usually what's] a flash.
I’ve had hotmail messages take 8 hours to get to Yahoo, before. Sending from Sasktel to Yahoo took just seconds at the same time Hotmail was delayed. I’ve also seen PayPal spoof messages pop into my inbox on coincidentially the same day as I listed things on eBay, and not the days before or after. Either the spam filter got confused on that day because of the other legit eBay messages I was getting, or a server somewhere along the line was monitoring emails headers for keywords then would send flagged addresses the spoof emails. Just one theory anyway.
personally I think this research provides me with a great excuse for not getting back to people
Who says? Who did the study? Sounds like a rumor. It’d be easy to test this, too…
Chris, Craig Newmark, the founder of Craigslist posted it. He heard it personally from engineers. Craig is one of the pioneers of the web.
What percentage of the email sent using for-money-providers goes missing? I would guess that it’s about the same as the freebies. The technology isn’t that different.