Q3 e-mail delivery rates improved, Lyris says

The average gross e-mail delivery rates for permission-based messages fell to 87% in the third quarter, down from 90% in the second quarter, for the top Internet service providers and e-mail service providers, according to Lyris Technologies Inc.

In-box deliverability rates also fell incrementally to 86%, due in large part to an increase in the amount of blocked and undelivered e-mail among European providers. In contrast, U.S. providers showed improvement in the delivery of opt-in e-mail in the third quarter, raising the average rate 4 percentage points to 89%, Lyris said.

In addition, despite an increase in false positive spam filtering for two U.S. domains—Hotmail and Gmail—overall rates of false positive spam filtering continued to drop from the second quarter’s 1.4% average to 1.2% in the third quarter.

Major ISPs posting top third-quarter deliverability scores in the third quarter were PeoplePC, Mailblocks and RoadRunner—each of which delivered more than 95 % of requested e-mail to the recipients’ inbox without mislabeling it or filtering it as spam, Lyris said. Other top-performing ISPs were Yahoo (95%), Juno (94.98%) and USA.net (94.71%).

Meanwhile, Gmail’s rate of inappropriate filtering rose from 4% to 7% in the third quarter, while Hotmail’s rate rose from 5% to 9%, according to Lyris.

Lyris, a provider of e-mail marketing provider, monitored 45,415 permission-based e-mail messages sent out by 49 businesses and non-profit organizations between July and September to multiple accounts at 41 ISP and e-mail service provider domains in the United States and Europe.