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Lyris Reports: Spam & Requested E-mail Filtering Has Improved
[July 13, 2005]

Lyris Reports: Spam & Requested E-mail Filtering Has Improved


E-mail marketing solutions provider Lyris reports that filtering of permission-based e-mail among ISPs has improved.

By DAVID R. BUTCHER
Assistant Editor, Customer Interaction Solutions

I hope they’re right.

Lyris, an e-mail marketing technology provider, today publishes its findings of improved permission-based e-mail messages filtering among ISPs in the second business quarter of 2005.

Said Lyris VP of Deliverability Robb Wilson in a company statement: “ISPs appear to be getting better at distinguishing legitimate e-mail marketing messages from spam.”

According to Wilson, average rates of inaccurate filtering for Q2 were around one percent this quarter, a noticeable and notable improvement from the first part of last year.

It appears, then, that ISPs are using more sophisticated filtering practices.

The report, published today as part of Lyris’ quarterly ISP Delivery Report Card, documents and proffers the delivery rates of 72,406 legitimate permission-based/requested e-mail messages sent to accounts at 41 major Internet service providers over the three-month period of April to June.



Personally, I used to find that many times a month, a week, a day, a newsletter or news alert I subscribe to would be filtered into my spam or junk box. What oft occurred was one of two extremes with spam filtering: I received myriad e-mail offering to “increase my girth and be hard as a rock,” to “simply solidify my home loans,” and even more tasteless, to “receive SUPER discounts on color printing”; or, the other extreme, the NYC photography exhibit or Brooklyn indie music news that I DO want to receive each week went directly to my junk-mail box. Without behooving myself as a Google P.R. person, however, I must note: With Gmail over the past two years, the medium has been met happily, the extremes more and more infrequently occurring — typically, what I want in my inbox goes to my inbox, while sexual, domestic and financial offers go directly to spam.

According to the report, Google’s Gmail service followed the overall trend toward improved e-mail processing: only four percent of permission-based messages inappropriately filtered to bulk folders, an improvement of 16 percent in Q1. Other major ISPs that achieved top deliverability scores by the report: Outblaze, Earthling, PeoplePC, USA.net and RoadRunner — each of which delivered more than 95 percent of requested e-mail to the inbox without mislabeling or filtering as spam. Compuserve, Yahoo, Lycos, Knology and Mac.com were also included in the top ISP performers in the report.


Monitored e-mail publications by Lyris’ report include a wine-tasting club’s weekly bulletin, a professional team’s monthly newsletter, a lobbying group’s political alerts and a nonprofit organization’s digest of treatment advances in neurological disease. According to the report, in all cases recipient accounts made an explicit “opt-in” request to receive the e-mail messages tracked.

For a copy of the complete report, please visit http://www.lyris.com/resources/reports/.

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David Butcher is Assistant Editor of Customer Interaction Solutions. To see more articles by David Butcher, please visit:

http://www.tmcnet.com/tmcnet/columnists/columnist.aspx?id=100008&nm=David%20
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