Leeds Email Delivery Times

This web page indicates how reliably you currently might be able to reach me via my university email addresses. All data on this page was obtained by an automated analysis of test emails sent from the outside to my university account.

I started this page when I was still at Warwick university (occasional hiccups in the email system there made me wonder whether or not I was loosing email). When I moved to Leeds, I just switched the system over to my new email addresses and kept it running.

Summary

100.0% of all test emails during the last two weeks (all time: 100.0%) were delivered within one hour.
the average delivery time over the last two weeks was 9.3 seconds (the all time average was 4.4 minutes)
the longest observed delivery time was 5.5 hours (for a mail sent on 2009-06-08)
2 of my test emails were lost (most of them on 2010-08-11)

Delivery Time Distribution

Figure 1 displays the cumulative distribution function of the measured email delivery times. This gives some rough idea how long emails to my university addresses take between entering the first delivery attempt and being accessible by me.

Figure 1. Empirical CDF of the delivery times in the Leeds email system. The black curve corresponds to the measurements from the last two weeks, the gray curve is for the total of all accumulated data. The coloured bands are 90% confidence intervals for the delivery time, green for the last two weeks and blue for all time. The solid lines in the bands give the 5%, 50% and 95% quantiles, the dashed lines give the expectations of the delivery time distributions.

Temporal Structure of Delivery Times

Figure 2 below shows how the delivery delay changed over time during the last two weeks.

Figure 2. Delays in the Leeds email system.

References

The excellent matplotlib library is used to auto-generate the figures above.

Copyright © 2010, Jochen Voss. All content on this website (including text, pictures, and any other original works), unless otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License. Last update: 2009-06-09.