A new study finds that legitimate marketing emails often get blocked by ISPs or email providers (updated with Gmail data)

Photo by Bruno Girin on Flickr. Some rights reserved

Marketing emails are increasingly being consigned to spam folders or simply dropped without delivery to the consumers they are emailed to, a study by the consultancy Return Path has shown.

In the first half of 2010, around 1 in 8 marketing emails – from bona fide companies rather than pumped out by spammers – never reached their intended recipients, the study says.

The proportion of such emails that done get there is rising: in the second half of 2009, the figure was about 1 in 9 emails not arriving.

The study by Return Path shows that Demon, the UK’s oldest ISP, is the hardest for marketers to reach.

This will of course have marketers weeping into their Appletinis – but customers of the ISPs may be happy. What’s at issue is quite how desired such emails are. Many sites will sign you up to emails, or say that you haven’t opted out, or buy email lists from elsewhere and act all surprised when you contact them to complain. And as there’s no equivalent of the Telephone Preference List (which also works for mobiles) for email, having a public email can be a trial.

Guy Shelton, vice-president for European Sales and Service at Return Path, said ISPs are just trying to do their jobs. “ISPs are battling extremely hard to protect their customers from the scourge of spam,” he said. “Marketers have their work cut out to prevent themselves from becoming friendly fire casualties in ISPs’ war on illegal unsolicited bulk email.”

Indeed, given that around 98% of email traffic is spam, it’s not surprising if ISPs are dumping lots of similar-looking stuff heading for their customers.

Still, they have it harder in France, where only 84.1% of those emails reach the recipient; in the UK it’s 86.5%; and in Germany it’s 87.0%, though Germany tends to regard them much more as spam.

There’s one glaring omission from Return Path’s study, in our eyes: what does Google, which has a growing email service, do? We have asked them and will add the response here if and when we get it.

In the meantime – we’d be interested in your tales of marketing emails gone astray. Or perhaps not gone astray enough.

(Note: revised to add Gmail data.)

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