Avid readers of our delivery-related posts might notice we put a lot of emphasis on a few major ISPs, like Gmail, Yahoo!, Hotmail, and AOL. With good reason, too—these four ISPs make up a little more than 50% of our total volume each month. Seriously, we send a lot of emails to them, so it would be easy to put the blinders on and focus only on delivering to these household names.

But let’s take a look at where the other 50% of our volume goes. In a recent week (considering our volume is in seasonal flux), we sent emails to 14.8 million different domains. Even if we remove the Big Four and all of their affiliate and international domains, we still sent to 14.8 million domains.

So how do 14.8 million domains squeeze into only 50% of our volume, almost equivalent to the same number of emails sent to the Big Four? Because we send fewer than 1,000 emails to 99.87% of those domains. Yep, only a teeny-weeny fraction of a percentage of domains actually receive more than 1,000 emails from us in a given week.

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I’ve become accustomed to weird looks when I tell people, “I’m a Delivery Engineer.” It’s not the easiest job to explain, and I’ve heard all the jokes about trains, pizza, and wonderful-sounding trains that deliver pizza.

There are a few quick answers I’ve worked up to help explain what a Delivery Engineer does:

• “I’m like the fireman on the ol’ steam engines,” which is surprisingly accurate, but assumes people know about that very particular type of fireman.
• “I make sure emails don’t go to spam,” though that sounds like I’m pushing spam, which is the exact opposite of what I do.
• “I make the emails go,” which is good enough for most folks.

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Hurricane Sandy hit the Northeast coast of the United States a few days ago. It caused massive destruction, unfortunate deaths, and a lot of trouble for people all over the world. While we don’t want to minimize what those living in the hurricane’s path have endured, we know a lot of you are talking about Sandy and should be aware of how that could impact email delivery.

According to a report by Symantec, there’s been a spike in email volume related to Hurricane Sandy. Sounds about right since Sandy didn’t exist until a week ago. But Symantec’s also reporting a surge in spam emails exploiting Hurricane Sandy, which is really interesting if you’re trying not to look like a spammer.

It makes sense from a spammer’s perspective to exploit any disaster. People are very sympathetic to the victims. They want to make donations, help in some way, or click links promising information and updates. So a lot of people are easy targets for spammers clever enough to use topical subject lines.

How many emails reference Sandy?

We put together a graph showing how much email referencing the hurricane has increased in the past few days.

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Recently, some news broke about Yahoo’s increasing reliance on engagement for detecting spam, joining the likes of Gmail, AOL, and Hotmail.

So what’s the big deal here? Previously, email providers relied mostly on content filters to determine whether or not emails were spammy, and it was relatively easy to work within those algorithms to send legit-looking emails. Avoid these specific words, don’t include those bad links, add the required headers, etc. But with the engagement model, email providers are relying less on cold, logical computers and more on emotional, irrational humans.

Consider this the un-Vulcaning of spam filters.

With more and more email providers looking at how their users interact with emails to determine “spaminess,” now is a good time to evaluate what this means for email senders and ways to improve delivery rates.

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A year ago, we posted some nifty data about how many emails per month we send to major email providers. Archivists and aficionados can read the blog post here: Major Email Provider Trends Update: Gmail Pretty Much Caught Up

We can neither confirm nor deny whether chocolates were involved in getting last year’s data published, but we decided to update for 2012 in lieu of any confectionary goodness. This one’s on us.

Picking up from 2011, we saw Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo neck and neck. Gmail had overtaken Hotmail for the first time, but they traded top place for a few months.

This year, Gmail claimed the largest recipient honor with over 100 million more emails than Hotmail in July. Yowza!

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