Legitimate emails getting lost?

Anybody has a clue on what percentage of legitimate emails never reach their destination?
because of spam traps, ISPs servers temporarely out of order/under attck etc.

Adam
Monday, July 12, 2004

Last time I calculated the number of emails I didn't get, it was 4.2%

Philo

Philo
Monday, July 12, 2004

Surely you know that 78.3% of all statistics are made up on the spot.

www.MarkTAW.com
Tuesday, July 13, 2004

42% of perople think that statistics can be used to prove anything.

Steve Jones (UK)
Tuesday, July 13, 2004

Doh "perople" -> "people".

Steve Jones (UK)
Tuesday, July 13, 2004

If your email is not delivered you will normally get a message.

But spam filters wiill obviously not tell you.

Stephen Jones
Tuesday, July 13, 2004

marktaw, it's not 78.3% however 87.14% sais that, the reality is 57.974%. just the facts :)

Tuesday, July 13, 2004

57.974% of people are wrong.

www.MarkTAW.com
Tuesday, July 13, 2004

I constantly have to dig important emails out of the spam filters at work.  I never got the news that my dad's dog died!

Keith Wright
Tuesday, July 13, 2004

Interesting this should come up. I emailed a resume in response to a job posting about a week ago and didn't get the usual "your resume is being reviewed" response, so maybe I got blcoked. My experience is that an autoreply is standard; anybody know different?

Caveat
Tuesday, July 13, 2004

IMHO it used to be quite rare for an email to just disappear down the bitbucket, even to the point of it being something "unclaimable". Your email never arrived or bounced? Yeah right.

But starting around two years ago this actually started to happen more and more. Nowadays when someone says "I sent it last week, didn't you get it?" I hardly blink. For important stuff I acually text or call a "did you get my mail", because there is a serious chance of it having been filtered/dropped/gotten stuck somewhere.

Just me (Sir to you)
Tuesday, July 13, 2004

83.47% of people treat email as very reliable.

8.75% of people remember that SMTP has no delivery guarantees.

99.999% of spam can be correctly filtered by a Bayesian filter given enough training data.

66% of my email is spam, only had 2 false positives out of about 6000 spam.

0.004567% of the email going through our server has ever been lost - dropped, deleted, etc.  Everything else has either been passed on to another server or delivered or bounced locally.

5/5 of these stats are approximate

Ward
Tuesday, July 13, 2004

39.5621% of people get the idea already.

www.MarkTAW.com
Tuesday, July 13, 2004

Recently, myself and a friend found out that an e-mail with the exact subject of "Congratulations" did not arrive when sent to an sbcglobal.net destination.

No warnings, bounces... just gone.

My friend reported it, and it was escalated to engineers supposedly. That was weeks ago. Still no idea what that problem is.

We don't know what other e-mail isn't getting through.

It's not a spam blocker thing, as the folder that the SPAM is moved to does not contain the messages.

Mark S
Wednesday, July 14, 2004

"5/5 of these stats are approximate"

Is that 100%, or can it be represented by just a near enough floating point approximation?

Wednesday, July 14, 2004

I honestly think you will get a message if the recipeints mail server has problems.

Now it may well disappear when it gets there (and the same may be true of Hotmail and Yahoo), and before it gets to the recipients account.

Stephen Jones
Thursday, July 15, 2004

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