| Note that the figure of "1.57% lost" was the loss over all messages sent to all mail service providers over the period of a month of the study. One mail provider lost 10% of messages, and similar unreliable providers also contributed to inflating the overall loss rate to more than what would be expected from more reliable service providers. While we have observed loss with all providers tested so far, for some of the providers only one or two messages have been lost, of thousands sent, so we can't quantify the loss rate for these providers with confidence. |
| We're looking for volunteers to participate in our email reliability measurement study and to tell us "war stories" about their email experiences. Please follow this link if you're interested. |
Tens of billions of e-mail messages get sent every day, but how many of them get through? Most people have experienced bounced email and have received non-delivery notifications or returned mail errors, but how many emails get lost silently without any warning to the sender? We've shown how the store-and-forward nature of current email systems can lead to emails being silently lost, and have measured the performance of several email providers and have observed loss with all of the providers tested.
Slides for the presentation at Email Management World are available here in Powerpoint and PDF formats.
Slides for a presentation about some of our ideas about email storage in PDF format.
This work is part of a broader project investigating network dependability
2005: Project developing tools to improve email reliability
Address queries to t.moors AT unsw.edu.au (Assuming some level of trust in email dependability!)