Thursday the worst time to send an email
Wednesday 02 July 2008 09:51:22 by Andrew Ferguson
Many users will have heard of Epitiro's broadband service metrics from previous quarterly updates. They have now announced the results of tests looking at how fast emails are delivered by using a network of 450 computers around the UK. The top five providers are shown below, with an industry average of 95.4% of emails being delivered within 3 minutes of being sent during the tests. The worst performing provider averaged 89.6% of emails delivered in less than 3 minutes.
| Ranking | Broadband Provider | Emails delivered in under 3 minutes |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Tesco | 99.9% |
| 2 | Virgin Media | 99.8% |
| 3 | Orange | 99.5% |
| 4 | Pipex | 99.2% |
| 5 | Demon | 96.3% |
Epitiro determined that the worst time for e-mail delivery was Thursdays between 5pm and 6pm with the worst ISP only delivering 63% of email in less than 3 minutes whilst 23% took between 3 minutes and 10 minutes and 13% of emails took longer than 10 minutes. The best time to send email would appear to be Saturday between 11pm and midnight, when the industry average runs at 98.3%.
The vast majority of email does not need to be delivered instantly, but when shopping online or waiting for site registration emails such as those sent out by thinkbroadband, it can quickly become frustrating if an email takes a while to arrive.
It would be quite interesting if Epitiro added third party e-mail services like Gmail, Hotmail, etc. as well as web interfaces provided by hosting companies since these are used by many consumers and small businesses alike instead of traditional POP3/IMAP e-mail setups in their mail client.
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Yes, hotmail would be interesting.
Given it takes hours for emails sent to it to arrive, at a minimum, and it often randomly drops emails sent and recieved..
Epitiro's possibly latin for investigating worthless big smelly piles of .... (fill in the blanks)
Christ knows where they get their cash to waste time producing pointless stats (and not for the first time either)... Oh no everyone run from Demon only 96% of the time will you get an email within 3 mins. I mean my god ive seen some pointless cack in my time but this has to take the grand prize.
What did this cost? They say 'These findings do not necessarily imply that the ISPs
above will maintain their performance levels in future.'
And what about the other ISPs, why just 5?
and they lump together over 10 mins and lost.
I just love you internet whingers. The type of people who if offered a million pound cheque for no reason at all you would complain and ask why not 2 million. I suggest that you get a life. Wipe the sperm off your screen. Go get a girlfriend or boyfriend. Interact with some real people and get some enjoyment from your lives instead of constantly complaining about everything. Enjoy!
It seems for once somerset and i think along similar lines... Epitiros statistics are a complete waste of time and money, they tell nothing to nobody, they only ever look at a very small selection of ISPs rather than shaking it up a little and being more random. When the stats are complete they read like a book with no words... pointless!
@Montypython...... Yep everyone should stop whinging.... Oh hang on that wont work, your post was a whinge about the whingers... Nice logic!!!
Touche
montypython - great. Now do some business by email and find some "anti-spam crusader's" censorware has binned your business emails and the company you were talking to has gone elsewhere.
I have no problems. And I wouldn't rely on hotmail for business communications. It's not a guaranteed service. In fact no piblic internet service is. I suggest that you go to a B2B provider. They might offer you something more substantial.
Mmmm..what about Tiscali?
It would be good to know what they were timing. Were they timing the time taken to deliver to a common 3rd party mailbox (not fair test), or the time taken for the email to leave the ISPs' mail servers/network? Looking at mail headers you often see significant discrepancies in 'time of day' set on the servers. I used to regularly receive email from Bulldog well before the time they sent it - fast or what !
quote"And I wouldn't rely on hotmail for business communications"
Believe it or not but there are some very reliable free email services out there which include being able to use as POP, i have one freebie email account with a lesser known service which has always been just if not more reliable than some ISPs email services.... Hotmail though yea thats rubbish blocks alot of stuff and you have no say in it.
I'd say that report is pretty worthless without knowing what ISPs were included in the test.