False-Positive Filtering Still a Problem: Lyris
False-positive spam filtering, despite improvements, continues to plague U.S. e-mailers according a study from Lyris Technologies.
Hotmail had a false positive rate of 18.2% in the second quarter, compared with 23.4% during the prior quarter. But Gmail’s declined radically, from 44% to 2.87%.
European ISPs have an average false-positive rate of only .075%, compared with 3.29% in the U.S., Lyris said. This is due to “excess false-positive filtering” at cs.com and iwon.com, the company continued.
“While false positives are increasing among some ESPs, the industry as a whole is winning the fight to reduce the amount of spam,” said Dave Dabbah, director of sales and marketing for Lyris, in a statement.
To conduct the study, Lyris monitored the delivery of 57,836 permission-based e-mails sent from 57 businesses and nonprofit groups. The messages were sent to multiple accounts at 39 ISP and ESP domains in the U.S. and Europe.
False positives are e-mails that are incorrectly identified as spam.
Lyris, a subsidiary of J.L. Halsey, is an e-mail service provider.