Spam's rush hour timed

AN EMAIL forwarding company has done a test on when its ‘direct marketing clients' get their campaigns bounced by spam blockers and has charted the spam rush hours.

Return Path, which based the data on looking at the results of more than 16,000 of its clients' campaigns reckon that most spam gets sent out between 10am and 2pm on Saturdays and Sundays.

The spammers also try similar times during the week, but less often. The New York Times quoted George Bilbrey, vice president for deliverability services at Return Path, as saying that ISPs used filters that looked at a number of factors to determine the deliverability of a message, including the time it was sent. ISPs appear to have noticed that spammers send email at certain times of day or days of week more than others and set their blockers accordingly.

It is possible to tell the times that most Spam is sent by the amount of the junk that gets bounced. Apparently mail sent between 10am and 2pm on Saturday and Sunday is 10 per cent less likely to get to its target. So that is a USP for the ISPs which ought to ramp up ASPs. µ