* Is your e-mail getting through?
At the Inbox show in San Jose last week, someone asked a good question: When will e-mail be regarded as just as reliable as postal mail in the context of the assuredness of its delivery?
Periodically, we all receive postal mail that contains a notice on the envelope, such as ‘payment enclosed’ or ‘information you requested.’ This information is provided so that we don’t mistakenly identify valid mail as junk mail and thereby accidentally throw away a check or some other desired content. While we’ve probably thrown away some valuable content in postal mail, those incidents are few and far between for most of us.
However, that is nowhere near the case with e-mail. A large proportion of e-mail content, even though desired by recipients, is blocked or deleted by ISPs as spam or at least is labeled as suspect content. For example, Pivotal Veracity published some statistics last year that demonstrate how much opt-in content is either labeled as spam or simply never arrives at its intended destination. The company found that anywhere from 2.6% to 51.1% of legitimate, opt-in e-mail simply went missing – it was never delivered to the recipient. Similarly, as much as 53.4% of opt-in e-mail was mistakenly sent to a spam quarantine. Complicating the problem is that many users will label opt-in content that they signed up to receive as spam once they grow tired of receiving it or if they forgot they signed up for it.
There are lots of services out there that are focused on helping to ensure higher delivery rates by modifying the content of an e-mail message to avoid common spam-filtering techniques and the like. This is increasingly critical as organizations look to e-mail to provide a wide variety of opt-in content, ranging from credit card and banking statements to newsletters to confirmation orders of various types, not to mention legitimate marketing content with customers or prospects that is not necessarily opt-in. For example, we send out Amazon.com gift certificates to survey respondents and all too frequently have to resend these certificates to individuals who never received the original e-mail because a spam-filtering system assumed that the gift certificate was bogus.
The answer to the question of when e-mail will be just as reliable as postal mail is, at best, ‘maybe someday.’
