Friends Reunited, the social networking site that helps old school friends stay in contact with each other, appears to be winning its war against UK internet providers and their strict anti-SPAM (junk email) filters. At one point ISPs were blocking one in four (27%) of the 30 million emails sent by the site in May 2010 and 5.7% were getting through but still ending up in spam folders.

It's claimed that Friends Reunited, which has suffered in the face of Facebook's growing dominance but remains home to 20.6 million members, was finally able to turn the tables on this problem after just one month of working with email experts at Return Path. The experts managed to boost the websites email deliverability from 67.1% in May to 92.5% in June 2010.

Return Path notes that social networks often suffer from poorer email reputations compared to companies in other sectors, with related emails being marked as spam 100% more often than email from other sectors.


In fairness to the ISPs, we can easily understand why emails from related websites end up being identified as junk. Such social networking sites do have a rather annoying habit of churning our masses of unwanted update messages.

Return Path confirms this by saying that the high volumes of spam complaints are a "huge driver of email deliverability failures", meaning the "emails that social network subscribers actually want" can be diverted to spam folders or blocked outright at ISP level. However this also suggests that a lot of people do NOT want such messages, otherwise they would not complain.

Sadly some sites also fail to include an option for disabling all of these communications during signup, which can lead to people merely marking the messages as SPAM instead of checking their settings on the site. Earlier users of Facebook and Friends Reunited will know exactly what we're talking about. In light of this, perhaps our title should have put "legitimate" inside speech marks.