Pivotal Veracity Email False Positive Study

According to leading anti-spam providers who service both ISPs and enterprises, the false positive rate is negligible:

• Message Labs: SLA guarantees “0.0004% false positives”
• Brightmail: “false positive rate of fewer than 1 false positive in every 1 million messages”
• Postini: “best overall balance of accuracy (97%) and false positives (.08%)”

However, these figures contrast substantially with the average false positive rate of 20% identified by Deliverability Service Providers1 who are monitoring the deliverability of opt-in communications for the legitimate sending community.

Why are these figures so vastly different? Is the false positive rate a fraction of a percent or is it closer to 20% or even higher? Are the sending and receiving constituencies – even within the same organization - calculating false positives differently and, if so, is it time we establish some commonality so that productive and meaningful discourse may take place between the two parties?

Do we even care if there are false positives? Are legitimate, albeit sometimes overzealous, retailers who send their customers promotions the only unfortunate companies whose messages are sometimes erroneously treated as spam or is this a universal problem impacting some of the most well-respected brands, non-profits, and governmental agencies? Are false positives limited to marketing messages and newsletters or are critical transactional emails also being filtered out? Do the opt-in processes, authentication methodologies, deployment methods, etc. that a company implements have any significant bearing on whether their messages will avoid the false positive hole? While this study certainly cannot possibly answer all of these questions, the results do definitively shed light on the fact there is a problem – a problem that is, unfortunately, both universal and indiscriminate in its reach. It is our hope by sharing the results of this study with both the sending and receiving community, that we will help engender more open, honest and productive dialog on how we can fight spam together while still preserving email as an essential, effective, and reliable communication medium for companies and individuals.

Pivotal Veracity Email False Positive Study