E-MAILBOX PROVIDERS blocked 19.2% of all permission-based commercial e-mail during the first half of 2006, according to a study by e-mail delivery firm Return Path.
This average is a slight improvement over the 21% reported in the second half last year, the firm noted.
Non-delivery rates hit an average of 15% in 2002 and peaked in 2004 at an average 22%, Return Path continued. Internet service providers use spam complaints as the No. 1 factor in determining whether to block incoming mail from a specific sender.
Why the improvement this year?
“ISPs are getting more sophisticated and more accurate in their protocols for filtering,” said Heather Goff, vice president for client management and deliverability consulting at Return Path. “But marketers are increasingly understanding how they're being evaluated.”
Still, 19.2% is not good enough, she added.
“Though the numbers are improving, they're still not where we want, as an industry, to see them,” Goff added. “The reason is there's still a surprisingly low awareness [among marketers] of what their reputation is.”
At 50.7%, Excite led the ISPs in blocking commercial e-mail during the first half. Adelphia came in at No. 2 at 35.5%, according to Return Path. Gmail blocked 34.3%, the company said.
Next on the list were Hotmail (22.7%) and MSN (22.4%).
CompuServe blocked the lowest percentage over the period, 11.8%. USA.net came in second at 13.2%. Yahoo! stopped 15.2% and AOL 14.1%, Return Path's report stated.
Corporate spam filters improved significantly in the first half this year, with Brightmail filtering 14.9% of permission-based e-mail and MessageLabs 20%, compared with 21.5% and 30%, respectively, during the second half of 2005, Return Path noted.
In a separate study, Lyris Technologies reported that false-positive spam filtering continues to plague U.S. e-mailers despite improvements.
Hotmail had a false-positive rate of 18.2% in the second quarter, compared with 23.4% during the prior quarter. But Gmail's declined radically, from 44% to 2.87%, Lyris said.
European ISPs have an average false-positive rate of just .075%, vs. 3.29% in the United States, Lyris added. False positives are e-mails incorrectly identified as spam.
