Here’s a thing, what travels at 2,000 miles per second but normally takes up to three minutes to arrive?
The answer is an email.
Speedy they may be, but email delivery is very much in the hands of your ISP if you don’t run your own email server.
A study by Epitiro, the global broadband benchmarking people, shows that the top five ISP in the UK deliver over 96 per cent of email messages within three minutes of the send button being clicked. Tests using a network of 450 computers around the UK revealed an industry average of 95.4 per cent of messages landing in the recipient’s inbox in under three minutes.
The study also found that the worst time for email delivery was Thursdays between 5pm and 6pm, with some 13 per cent of messages taking more than 10 minutes from send button to inbox. During this ‘email rush hour’ an estimated seven per cent of emails are either severely delayed or lost altogether.
The best time to send email would appear to be Saturday between 11pm and midnight, when the industry average worked out at 98.3% of messages being delivered within three minutes.
For the record, top of the POP3’s was Tesco broadband, the Internet service from Britain’s largest supermarket chain. In the year to March 2008, Tesco broadband delivered 99.9 per cent of emails within three minutes of dispatch.
Virgin came a close second with 99.8 per cent of emails reaching their destination within three minutes, with Orange and Pipex both achieving figures above 99 per cent. Demon completes the top five.
The Epitiro study was the UK’s first Email Performance Index. Epitiro monitored the email performance of UK Internet Services Providers (ISPs) between April 2007 and March 2008 to deliver the most accurate picture of the true email performance experienced by end users.
Epitiro’s Managing Director Gavin Johns said: “The message for the industry from Epitiro’s first annual Email Performance Index is: ‘Not bad, but could do better’.”
“Email delivery speed is a very important factor in internet communications, not least for the credibility of an online business,” added Johns. “When customers shopping online are told to await email confirmation of a purchase, they expect this to arrive in no more than a couple of minutes. If an email takes longer than three minutes to arrive, many customers will worry that something has gone wrong, and may go through the time-consuming process of contacting the vendor’s customer service line. If an email takes more than ten minutes to arrive, most users will consider the delivery as having failed.”
The industry annual average for successful delivery of email, defined as messages delivered within three minutes, is 95.4 per cent. While this indicates a generally good service level, the technology industry looks for ‘five nines’, or 99.999 per cent reliability in all forms of communication. Yet 1.2% of all emails took between three and ten minutes to arrive, while 3.4% took longer than 10 minutes to be delivered and thus were considered to be ‘lost’ in the eyes of users.
“If you think email is 100 per cent reliable, think again,” advised Johns. “Consumers and businesses seeking a reliable email service need to consider performance metrics when choosing a service provider, and certainly shouldn’t choose an ISP on price alone. What’s more, IT managers should set email performance standards with their chosen ISP before the service begins.”
