Delivery challenges increasing Return Path published their most recent Global Deliverability report this morning. This shows that inbox placement of mail has decreased 6% in the second half of 2011. This decrease is the largest decrease Return Path has seen in their years of doing this report. To be honest, I’m not surprised at the decrease. Filters are getting more sophisticated. This means they’re not relying on simply IP reputation for inbox delivery any longer. IP reputation gets mail through the SMTP transaction, but after that mail is subject to content filters. Those content filters are getting a lot better at sorting out “wanted†from “unwanted†mail. I’m also hearing a lot of anecdotal reports that bulk folder placements at a couple large ISPs increased in the first quarter of 2012. This is after the RP study was finished, and tells me increased bulk folder placement is more likely to be a trend and not a blip. One of the other interesting things from the RP study is that the differences are not across all mail streams, but are concentrated in certain streams and they vary across different regions. Just looking at the NOAM region, we see that gaming mails have the worst inbox delivery, but most of the mail is getting through the IP filters. Placement of gaming mails in the spam folder tells me there’s a lot of content based filtering happening. For retail mail we see a different pattern. More mail is missing and less mail is filtered to the spam folder. This indicates a lot of IP based filtering, but if a mail gets past the IP filters, it’s more likely to end up in the inbox. This chart really does demonstrate that “Best Practices†aren’t global. They’re very dependent on the type of mail and the recipient profile. In North America, too, it shows that mail people interact with regularly is getting to the inbox reasonably consistently. It’s the mail people don’t necessarily care if they get or not that’s suffering the most. Another interesting data point is how gaming mail changes across various regions. In APAC, gaming mail is hitting the inbox 91% of the time. That may be a consequence of the number of people in Asia employed full time to play games (gold farming) and their interest in receiving mail about work. Overall, this report tells us that delivery is only getting harder and more complex. Mail isn’t going to the inbox as much as it used to, and that means senders are going to have to keep adapting to recipients wants and needs. Source: http://blog.wordtothewise.com/
And on the flip side: Report: Feeble spam filters catch less junk mail Enterprise spam filters are blocking less junk mail, according to independent tests from Virus Bulletin. During a comparative of 20 corporate email filtering products, several missed more than twice as much spam as in previous editions of the VBSpam tests. Virus Bulletin reckons the drop in performance might be down to improved tactics by spammers rather than a dip in the capabilities in the filtering products it put through their paces. "This is a worrying trend," says VB's anti-spam test director Martijn Grooten. "There have been many news stories highlighting a global decline in spam in recent months, but if spam filter performances decline too, the situation for the end-user doesn't improve at all." "It is hard to say what exactly caused filters to miss more spam, but it looks like spammers are doing a better job at avoiding IP- and domain-based blacklists. It may be a sign that they are increasingly using compromised legitimate systems to send their messages," he added. The best performance in the March 2012 anti-spam comparative review came from Libra Esva, which blocked 99.97 per cent of all spam messages without blocking any legitimate mail, making it the only product to obtain the new 'VBSpam+' award. Other products with a good spam capture rate of better than 99 per cent included Kaspersky Anti-Spam, GFI, McAfee, Symantec, Sophos and others. BitDefender caught 98.94 per cent of spam but it avoided any false positives. McAfee SaaS caught 99.93 per cent of junk mail but it binned a significant proportion of legitimate messages, 0.21 per cent (the worst performance among the tested products). Most products still blocked more than 99 out of 100 spam emails, and no product incorrectly marked more than 1 in 470 legitimate emails as spam. Taken in isolation such figures might be seen as pretty good, however, since both the spam-catching rates and false detection rates both got worse this month Virus Bulletin is in no mood to pop any champagne corks. "More spam means more time wasted dealing with it, a greater chance of falling for scams, and a greater chance of accidentally deleting legitimate emails," it notes. By John Leyden http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/03/20/spam_filters_performance_dip/
