(Direct Newsline) Don’t believe all those horror stories about e-mail not being delivered. ISPs and ESPs are doing a better job of getting opt-in e-mail into inboxes than they were three months ago—with two notable exceptions. That’s the finding of the latest ISP Deliverability Report Card for Q3 2005 from Lyris Technologies, an e-mail platform provider.
The report, which examined the delivery outcomes of more than 45,000 permission-based e-mail messages to accounts at 41 ISPs in the U.S. and Europe, found that U.S. delivery rates for opt-in e-mail rose in the third quarter to 89%, up from 85% in the previous quarter.
But combining both the U.S. and European results, the Lyris study found an overall quarterly decline in both gross deliverability rates (delivery either to an in-box or a bulk folder) and in-box deliverability. Total gross deliverability rates fell to 87% from 90% in Q2, while total in-box deliverability declined slightly to 86% for the quarter. Lyris attributed the declines to a rise in e-mail blocking among European providers.
False positives — permission-based e-mail messages picked up as spam and shunted to bulk folders by the delivering ISPs — declined overall to 1.2% in Q3 from 1.4% in the previous quarter, and the U.S. only figure held steady at 2.1% of all communications. While five U.S. domains showed evidence to suggest that they have substantial false-positive issues, only two of those — MSN Hotmail and Google’s Gmail service — displayed higher rates of inappropriate categorization in Q3 than in the previous quarter.
According to Lyris, Hotmail’s false positive rate was 9.4%, up from 5.6% in Q2, while Gmail’s 7.2% rate was substantially higher than the 4.1% it posted for the earlier three months. In Hotmail’s case, the Lyris report speculates that its imposition of new Sender ID requirements during the quarter may have contributed to the increase in false positives.
“While the average rate of e-mail delivery remains high, the report also shows that performance among individual ISPs can vary greatly,” says Lyris vice president Robb Wilson. “Companies with large in-house e-mail lists should really be doing deliverability audits of the e-mail campaigns at the ISP level. This can be particularly worthwhile with the larger providers such as Yahoo! and Hotmail.”
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