How much of your email is spam?

Our CIO today decided to send the IT department the monthly statistics for our Postini spam filters. It’s been a few years since I worked in a place where I was the Postini Administrator, so I haven’t seen the percentages of mail that actually gets delivered in a while. It was around 30% at the small organization I worked for at the time.

Our’s has now reached a point where only about 12.5% of all email that hits Postini addressed for our domain, actually gets passed through to our Exchange server. I think it would be safe to assume that some of that is still spam, so we’re closing in on 90% of our email being spam.

If you have access to this sort of information at your place of business, are you seeing something similar? Have you reached a point where you question the effectiveness of email, by doing things like calling to follow up on an email, or asking people to confirm that they actually get your email? I know I’m beginning to question how much of my personal email gets spam-filtered by mistake, or just gets lost in someone’s inbox. So far the effects haven’t been too drastic, but it seems like more and more email I send to people goes either unanswered, or seems to have a delivery lag time of a few hours, if not more. That’s not really useful.

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