We have a reasonably large sample of messages sent from Gmail, Yahoo and
Outlook and can assess how much was "spam foldered" by each of those
services. We are in the same ballpark as John Levine, who estimated that
"about 30% of the mail I get from Gmail is spam."
EmailGrades collects metrics about senders and receivers, primarily to
measure inbox placement and recipient engagement for commercial ESPs vs a
cohort of their peers, but we also have insights regarding messages sent by
mailbox providers like Gmail, Yahoo and Outlook. For the month of August
2022, millions of messages received from Gmail, Yahoo and Outlook's
email infrastructure by hundreds of thousands of panel mailboxes reveals
the following spam foldering rates:
Received at Gmail | Received at Yahoo | Received at
Outlook
Sent from Gmail 16% 38% 49%
Sent from Outlook 47% 78% 47%
Sent from Yahoo 5% 3% 9%
The way to read this table is, "Of the messages received by our Yahoo panel
mailboxes, 38% of those sent by Gmail were routed to Yahoo's spam folder"
and "Of the messages received by our Outlook panel mailboxes, 9% of those
sent by Yahoo were routed to Outlook's junk mail folder" and "Of the
messages received by our Gmail panel mailboxes, 47% of those sent by
Outlook were routed to Gmail's spam folder."
All other things being equal, Outlook filters messages from Gmail most
aggressively. Yahoo filters messages from Outlook most aggressively.
Outlook filters messages from Yahoo most aggressively.
Outlook's spam percentages are higher than Gmail's but that may be because
Outlook chooses to block less outbound mail and instead flags
questionable outbound messages, sending them via a pool of IPs that ought
to receive additional filtering scrutiny.
(Note: This analysis only summarizes the disposition of messages that were
actually delivered, either to the inbox or to the spam folder. The messages
that were blackholed are not accounted for here. This sample also excludes
messages sent or relayed by commercial ISPs on behalf of these mailbox
providers' sender domains.)
-- Paul Kincaid-Smith
On Mon, Sep 12, 2022 at 1:53 PM Brandon Long via mailop <mailop@mailop.org>
wrote:
>
>
> On Mon, Sep 12, 2022 at 10:26 AM Grant Taylor via mailop <
> mailop@mailop.org> wrote:
>
>> On 9/12/22 5:13 AM, Thomas Walter via mailop wrote:
>> > What bothers me most is that the oligopoly makes it impossible to
>> > deliver emails to protect their users from spam, yet it is the biggest
>> > source of it…
>>
>> Does anyone have any evidence that shows that the big players are the
>> biggest source of spam /by/ /percentage/ of outgoing messages?
>>
>
John Levine observed:
*Probably not, but it's the largest source of hard to filter spam. It
looksto me like about 30% of the mail I get from Gmail is spam, and
reliably*
*filtering that using just content clues is hard.*
>
>> I absolutely agree that they are the biggest source of spam /by/ /volume/.
>>
>> Sadly even a super tiny percentage of a huge volume is still a big
>> volume in and of itself. It's just math.
>>
>
> I don't think they are the biggest source of spam by volume either, but I
> think there
> is a very large amount of spam which targets just the large providers, or
> most of them.
>
> By their very nature, the personal servers that people are talking about
> here just don't see
> the same volume of spam.
>
> Gmail certainly receives an order of magnitude more spam attempts each day
> than all of the
> email that gmail sends. So, no, we are not the biggest source by volume.
>
> We deal with spam campaigns with message counts in the billions, I'm not
> sure how any
> personal server sees anything remotely representative of the big picture.
>
> Brandon
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>
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