The latest European Email Deliverability Benchmark Report (2H 2010) from Return Path has revealed that the UK's major broadband ISPs successfully prevented more than a fifth of marketing emails from reaching their customers inboxes. For example, more than a quarter of emails sent to BT customers (25.6%) were treated as SPAM (junk).

Return Path comically believes that ISP customers will actually be "disappointed" by their findings because many of the marketing emails had allegedly been "requested" (i.e. legitimate mail). This could apparently include such wonderfully annoying messages as "social media updates, email newsletters, promotions and vouchers for subscribers’ favourite shops and services".


Most UK internet users hate marketing emails, including many supposedly legitimate ones, which often appear to surface even after you've clicked that "Do not send promotions to my email address!" checkbox.


Apparently the UK saw an overall decline of almost 5% in emails reaching ISP inboxes during 2010, falling from 89.9% at the start of the year to the current rate of 85.2%. Similarly more than one in seven email marketing messages requested by UK consumers did not reach their inboxes and 8.6% went missing completely, while 6.2% headed straight to spam folders.

In fairness there's still a legitimate argument against overly aggressive SPAM filters that erase truly legitimate email between individuals, which isn't touched on by the report. Ultimately the best solution is one that allows customers to tweak and or control an ISPs anti-spam measures to suit their own preferences; even if that is merely in the form of a basic “on” or “off” switch.

The study found that UK ISPs BT and Demon Internet were the hardest internet providers for marketers to reach, with 25.6% and 24.5% of messages "going missing" respectively.