News 

The supermarket's broadband service delivers 99.9% of all emails within three minutes, according to the research. Virgin Media (99.8%), Orange (99.5%), Pipex (99.2%) and Demon (96.3%) complete the top five email providers. The industry average was 95.4%.

Epitiro's independent study used 450 satellite computers to send emails from a locations all across the UK. It claims to have used "special time synchronisation software" to have eliminated timing errors and all emails

ADVERTISEMENT

sent contained only a packet header to keep file sizes to the bare minimum.

"Email delivery speed is a very important factor in internet communications, not least for the credibility of an online business," claims Epitiro managing director, Gavin Johns.

"When customers shopping online are told to await email confirmation of a purchase, they expect this to arrive in no more than a couple of minutes," he adds. "If an email takes longer than three minutes to arrive, many customers will worry that something has gone wrong, and may go through the time-consuming process of contacting the vendor's customer service line. If an email takes more than ten minutes to arrive, most users will consider the delivery as having failed."

The research also identified Thursday evenings as the worst possible time to send an email. Between 5-6pm on Thursday is "email rush hour" when the volume of messages being sent across the internet is at its highest. Consequently, 7% of emails sent during this period are either seriously delayed or lost in the ether.