Junked email levels grow threefold

by Jennifer Whitehead, Brand Republic 30-Aug-07, 11:40

LONDON - Over a fifth of all the permission-based emails sent to European ISPs are ending up in junk or bulk mail folders, a threefold increase on the figure for the previous quarter.

At the same time, 25% of emails to US ISPs fail to end up in the user's inbox, according to the Lyris EmailAdvisor deliverability report card for the second quarter of the year.

Lyris attributes the growth in blocked emails to ISPs starting to rely on the Sender Policy Framework authentication method to identify if an email is legitimate, saying that it is the first time this check is appearing in content filter tests.

Email marketers who fail to maintain up-to-date records are likely to end up incurring a heavy penalty by failing an SPF check -- increasing the likelihood of their emails ending up marked as spam.

The dramatic growth in the rate of blocked emails highlights the importance of keeping up to date on the latest spam trends, for anyone who uses email as a marketing device.

Spammers change the way they attack in order to beat filters, and therefore ISPs change their filtering and monitoring policies to beat them.

Stefan Pollard, director of consulting services at EmailLabs, said: "The good news is that it's an easy fix for marketers -- in fact, it's completely in the sender's power to make sure the records are accurate at all times. Don't assume it's the responsibility of your system administrator. If you're responsible for the email programme, you need to realise the importance and test it yourself."

Lyris' EmailAdvisor ISP Deliverability Report Card is a quarterly research study that monitors deliverability rates for permission-based email marketing messages. The study measured the full delivery trajectories of more than 436,000 permission-based email marketing messages using ISP domains in the US, Canada, Europe and Australia.

A full copy can be viewed here.