Why Do You Expect ESPs to Provide You With Any Reasonable Service Level?

When speaking at the MailCon conference last week I was talking about the fact that ESPs mostly don't have an idea how much time it takes them to deliver an average email of their customer. And of course they don't want to share that lack of knowledge with their customers - that's why you never see a graph on delivery time in their beautiful interfaces.

Today I was signing up with an ESP, and it was funny to see "Our email will arrive within 5 minutes" during their sign up process.  My first thought was - "Oh, why to be so cautious?". But then an email arrived with a few minutes pause.

If ESPs can't guarantee their own delivery time for transactional email on one of top 3 mailbox providers - why do you expect them to provide you with any reasonable service level?

Received: from smtp1012.usndr.com (smtp1012.usndr.com. [185.18.53.46])        by mx.google.com with ESMTPS id q13si4359319wiv.18.2015.10.23.04.05.41        for <andrey.sas@gmail.com>        (version=TLSv1.2 cipher=ECDHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256 bits=128/128);        Fri, 23 Oct 2015 04:05:42 -0700 (PDT)...Date: Fri, 23 Oct 2015 11:03:02 +0000