European Deliverability Better Than US

A new study out from Lyris Technologies indicates that European ISPs and ESPs (email service providers) are out-delivering emails to consumers compared to United States providers. Still, the rates of false positives in email delivery are higher for large ESPs across the board.

by Kristina Knight

False positives, emails incorrectly identified as spam and redirected to bulk or spam folders, are highest for companies like gmail and hotmail although both have improved deliverability numbers for the second quarter of 2006 compared to the first quarter.

Gmail improved deliverability to 2.97% in Q2. In Q1 they were at 44% false positive. Comparatively, Hotmail was down to 18.2% for Q2 compared to 23.4% in Q1.

"While false positives are increasing among some ESPs, the industry as a whole is winning the fight to reduce the amount of spam," says Dave Dabbah, Director of Sales and Marketing, Lyris Technologies.
Overall false positive rates in the US are down 4% for inbox and gross deliverability compared to Q1.

In the United States the top 10 ESPs are 27% more likely to deliver opt-in emails to the inbox than the bottom 10 providers. European ISPs do have a lower average rate, most likely because of false positive filtering at US companies Compuserve.com and iwon.com. Both countries are getting better deliverability but US deliverability is worse. About 3.3% of emails are blocked from US providers compared to 0.075% blockage from European ESPs.