Nearly 40% of Emails in China Go Missing

I knew it felt like more emails seemed to disappear into the ether here than usual! According to an iResearch report based on data from Returnpath for the first half of this year, China’s lost email ratio — the percent of emails sent that never make it to the recipient — is 39 percent, way higher than the world average of 12 percent and the Asia average, which is 16 percent.

So what are the causes of this? iResearch had some theories:

• User error: People enter email addresses wrong in the “send” form, causing emails that go nowhere or bounce back to the sender. Or, alternatively, users send emails that are too long or contain attachments too big for the receiver’s email servers, which rejects them.
• Server error: Servers break and emails get lost; also, some of the free services in China may not support some of the features included in more feature-rich emails, causing them to be rejected.
• Hackers: When all else fails to explain it, it was teh h4x0rz!

Personally I wonder if there aren’t more, ahem, official reasons for the lost mail ratio to be so high, but that’s just me.

[Via Sina Tech]