• by Jack Loechner , Staff Writer @mp_research, May 7, 2008

According to the latest email deliverability study from Lyris, Inc. nearly one out of every four permission-based email messages sent to U.S.-based ISPs lands in the junk mail folder. Slightly more than 76 percent of invited email successfully makes it to the inbox.

Monitoring 436,558 production level, permission-based email marketing messages in the United States, Canada, Europe and Australia, the HQ ISP Deliverability Report Card (Q4, 2007) finds that the ISP in the U.S. with the highest inbox delivery rate is AIM.com, with 93 percent of its delivered messages landing in the inbox

RoadRunner SoCal is a close second at 92 percent, while the rest of the top 10 have inbox delivery rates in the 80s.  Hotmail is second from the bottom, with just 57 percent of its delivered messages reaching the inbox.

The U.S. ISPs most likely to relegate invited email to the junk mail folder include XO Concentric (62 percent of its total delivered permission-based messages were sent to the junk mail folder) and SBC Global (23 percent of its messages).  MSN Network, Hotmail and Yahoo all hover around 21 percent.  AOL is closer to the other end - with just 1.2 percent of its delivered email landing in the junk mail folder.

Outside the United States, European ISPs had the highest percentage of junk mail  delivery at 19 percent - compared with 14 percent for Canada and 10 percent for Australia.

Blaine Mathieu, SVP of Marketing, Lyris, Inc., said "These are messages that have been invited by the recipients, and yet... still aren't making it to the inbox...  much of the ISP's delivery decisions are based on a sender's reputation... governed primarily by how often... recipients click the ‘Report as Spam' button for its messages. 

Stefan Pollard, Lyris email marketing expert, points out that "The definition of spam has moved beyond the legal requirements of the CAN-SPAM Act to include any message that is unrecognized, unexpected or unwanted... This puts the onus on senders to make their messages recognized, expected and wanted.  Until they do, invited email will continue to be delivered to the bulk folder."     

1,716 unique emails from the sample were run through a content score application using the Spam Assassin Rule Set to see how they measure against ISP spam filters.  The top three most frequently triggered "red flags" were:

• Emails containing images with little to no text,
• A "from" name that isn't real and
• Messages that are 60 percent or more HTML.

Pollard concludes that  "...message content doesn't carry the same weight as sender reputation in determining where a message is delivered..."

For more information, and to view the report, please visit Lyris here.