They didn't receive your email?! Turns out, they really didn't.

There once was a time when you could send an email to someone and you could be certain that they would get it. Sending that email had a delivery rate higher than postal mail, it was a certainty. Unfortunately times have changed. No longer can you be certain that every email you send someone gets delivered to their inbox. It's not even a matter of them getting too much email, they don't see it, or their SPAM/VIRUS/SPYWARE/MALWARE/ETC filters blocked it. Nope, none of those...the email didn't even make it that far. Your email got stopped by the ISP or email provider before they even had a chance to forward it on to the person you were trying to send it to in the first place.

Email is not a direct communication from one person to another.

The email, like standard mail, has to go through several steps of sorting, handling, and checking before it reach it's destination. In the old glory days of 100% email delivery the email providers and ISP's pretty much passed the message on without bothering to really look at. Flash forward to today when that same email gets stopped by those same providers and scrutinized with an automated array of hardware and software. They want and need to make sure it's a legitimate piece of email and that it's something that you want to see. However, it's an automated process and there's not much, if any, gray line between a real email and SPAM email these days. The SPAM emailers and their brethren (virus emails, spyware, etc) try to make their email look as real and legitimate as they possibly can. Their goal is to get past those filters and they'll try every trick in the book to do it. This of course raises the bar for the filters and now it's not too hard to see that some of the 'real' email gets tossed along with the bad email.

How much of my email isn't getting there?

You might think, 'We need these filters in place to protect us from virus' and SPAM, but at what price to my email?' You're not going to be surprised to hear that 100% delivery is no longer the norm. What do you think it really is? The delivery rate varies by the recipient's email provider.

The more friendly email delivery list:

The not so friendly email delivery list:

You might think that having a higher delivery rate is better.

It is, if you want to sort out the junk, SPAM, and virus email's yourself. If you don't want to sort things out on your end then you run the risk of not receiving the legitimate email at all. It's a trade-off and like most things you need to make an informed decision.

Email providers blocked 21% of permission based email

Overall email providers blocked 21% of permission based email during the first and second quarters of 2005. Comparing that to 2004, which had 22% of all permission based email blocked, it's actually a 1% drop in blocked email. I wouldn't go so far as to say that's because the filters are better, but instead that fewer email SPAMMERS are finding it profitable to do business in the same way they have in the past.

Source: Return Path 2005