Staying on the subject of spam for just one more day, here are some interesting stats (and I promise not to rant). According to a study released yesterday by Return Path, Inc.'s Assurance Services
division, 17% of permission-based email messages get incorrectly blocked or filtered by the top 12 Internet Service Providers. This represents a 2% drop in delivery rates as compared to fourth quarter
2002, and a 5% drop as compared to third quarter 2002.
Return Path conducted the deliverability study during the first and second quarters of 2003. The study tracked the delivery, blocking, and
filtering rates of 9,956 email campaignsand found that blocking and filtering rates on the programs studied varied from a low of 1% to a high of 46%.
"Email deliverability continues to be a growing
problem for companies who rely on the email channel to reach customers," says George Bilbrey, general manager of Return Path's Assurance Services. "Since we began monitoring overall delivery, we've
seen a downward trend in delivery performance. Companies need to closely monitor and constantly improve their deliverability if they want to make sure their customers are receiving and responding to
their email."
The study showed that companies had the highest false-positive spam identifications and subsequent delivery issues with Mail.com and NetZero, at 38% and 34%, respectively. CompuServe
and AOL followed, at 31% and 25%. Yahoo had the lowest incidence of blocking and filtering, at 4%, followed by BellSouth and Earthlink, both at 7%.
"As ISPs and system administrators aggressively -
and appropriately - try to protect their users from spam, a lot of opt-in email is victimized," says Matt Blumberg, Return Path CEO. "It's like throwing the baby out with the bath water. It is up to
every company sending email to make sure its campaigns are done appropriately so that they avoid triggering spam filters."