Comments on: Average Delivery Rate is 56% for Legit Senders

By: Ben

Ben — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 20:10:35 +0000

@MrPete – Sucks for a non-profit to have to deal with that. Curious to know what kind of firewall you put in place.

By: MrPete

MrPete — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 19:32:27 +0000

We’re just getting started with email delivery providers. You’re one I’m now looking at seriously (as of five minutes ago ).

I will confirm JD’s observation. On our own server here, as a tiny (but long-term) non-profit, we receive on average 5-6000 email attempts per hour, and deliver maybe 20-40 emails from that stream… including the spam that gets through.

Bottom line: we receive way more than 99% spam. On a good day.

(Multiple simultaneous dictionary attacks is not a good day — I’ve seen up to 20 email attempts per second. Our poor server was begging for mercy until I configured an auto-firewall.)

By: Ben

Ben — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 19:20:17 +0000

As always, thanks for the explanation, JD!

By: J.D. Falk

J.D. Falk — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 17:59:54 +0000

“That either means commercial email marketers are not sending as much email (and “clogging up the intertubes”) as we all thought, or that they’re all sending from illegit or unknown servers, and not following best practices.”

Actually, that percentage is small because the serious, criminal spammers are sending an unbelievable amount of mail. Email marketers talk about a few million messages per day as if it’s a lot; a single spam campaign aimed at a major ISP regularly consists of a few billion messages in a few hours.