Spamcop Tops List of E-Mail Deliverability
In a study on e-mail deliverability released this week that produced surprising results, ISP spamcop.net delivered the highest percentage of opt-in business e-mails while Google's Gmail was near the bottom of the list.E-mail marketing firm Lyris Technologies, Berkeley, CA, found that ISPs with the highest delivery rates to inboxes of customers who requested e-mails from businesses and nonprofit groups were spamcop.net, at 97.3 percent of e-mails; CompuServe, which delivered 96.7 percent; and RoadRunner, 96.4 percent.
Lyris executives were surprised that Gmail was nearly last on the list, expecting it to be more sophisticated at differentiating legitimate e-mail from spam, said Shannon Coulter, marketing manager at Lyris. Gmail delivered only 79.1 percent of e-mails and filtered 16 percent of delivered messages.
"From a business perspective, if an e-mail gets filtered, it may as well have never arrived," Lyris general manager Luis Rivera said.
Average deliverability among ISPs to inboxes of customers who requested e-mails was 88.5 percent in the first quarter, Lyris found after examining 21,000 opt-in e-mails.
Spamcop was among the top deliverers in the first quarter because it sent the requested e-mail to the customer's inbox without mislabeling it as spam, Lyris found.
"Spamcop.net has one of the highest inbox deliverability scores," Rivera said. "There's an organization that's obviously deeply committed to fighting spam but also knows how to distinguish between legitimate e-mails and unwanted ones."
Meanwhile, Google contacted Lyris to learn how it can be more sophisticated in differentiating spam from opt-in e-mail, Coulter said. Other ISPs are also working to differentiate between the two, she added.
Christine Blank covers online marketing and advertising, including e-mail marketing and paid search, for DM News and DMNews.com. To keep up with the latest developments in these areas, subscribe to our daily and weekly e-mail newsletters by visiting www.dmnews.com/newsletters
