Outlook Send/Receive Problems
On occasion, we find our Outlook program does not send
messages immediately. This situation is rare but usually occurs at
the worst possible time (damn you Murphy) but simply closing and
reopening Outlook resolves the problem. Note: If you have a PDA
connected, you may need to disconnect it before closing Outlook. We
will (needless to say) post the fix if found.
The Internet
While researching a question for a customer, we ran
across some interesting Internet statistics. According to
Internetworldstats, there are nearly 6.5
billion people in the world and of the 888 million use the Internet.
It is all in the numbers... 67% of the people in
North America use the Internet but contrary to what we thought, North America accounts for only 25% of the Internet users
worldwide and while only 8% of
Asia use the Internet, they make up 34% of the worldwide users.
Time Spent
According to Stanford University (worldwide) the
average Internet user spends 3 hours per day online and of that, 57% is
communication related (email, instant messaging, etc.). Dealing
with spam accounts for 8% of that communication time.
Of the remaining 43%, 20% is spent playing games, 13%
surfing (research, etc.) and 10% shopping.
You know those cookies some people are afraid of?
Well one
purpose is to gather statistics. Click
here to see some of those results. Browser usage and other
odd statistics available
here. EMail
According to a Berkeley research team, there will be
between 610 to 1,110 billion email messages sent this year, with
an average size of 18,500 bytes. This means something
like 11 to 20 thousand terabytes of information being sent over
the Internet.
Click
here for more information on file sizes. In the US alone, 88% of adult Internet users have
personal email accounts. Further, 46% of them have email access at
work. Added together, eMarketer estimates that 147 million people across
the country use email, almost every day.
The number of email messages in the United States
alone is projected to reach a volume of 2.7 trillion by 2007.
Lost Messages
Depending on the
source, the average person sends 15 messages and receives 20 each
day. Of that 20, it is estimated 15 messages are spam which brings
us to the original research request: how many email messages are
lost.
Because of spam filters, the statistics on lost
messages are somewhat confusing and sometimes contradictory, but here is
what we found:
According to
http://www.pivotalveracity.com Excite, NetZero/Juno and Version
bounce, delete or misroute more than 25% of the messages with Excite
topping the list at over 50%!
This fall, Microsoft's Hotmail & MSN Mail
may very well share the Excite statistics! For more on
that
click here.
Most providers
claim a 90% to 98% delivery rate. However, overall it is
estimated that only 85% to 93% are properly routed.
Many of the deleted messages are simply discarded
leaving the sender is unaware of the failure because no notification
is sent.
There you have it Jeff... Avoid having your legitimate message bounced.
While spam filters are becoming very sophisticated and
are careful not to bounce legitimate messages, certain things that may
trigger a block include:
- Multiple exclamation points in the subject
line!!!
- Words surrounded by the *asterisk* or broken up with s p a
c e s
or other c_h_a_r_a_c_t_e_r_s
- The words "click here" in the body.
- Messages marked as high priority
Other interesting sites found during our research:
Tweaking Windows XP
Looking to "tweak" Windows XP safely?
Microsoft offers some tools that allow you to do just that.
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