ReturnPath just released their 2008 Q2 Reputation Benchmark Report. There’s a lot of great data to digest here.
- Only about 20% of email servers out there are properly setup and can be considered “legit” email senders.
- Your Sender Score can be closely correlated with your Delivered Rate (something I assumed in this blog post, but couldn’t provide any proof—until now). Note that “delivered” means “it made it to the machine of your recipient” but doesn’t necessarily mean “it wasn’t spam filtered.” The mailman delivers your mail, but doesn’t know if recipients will rip it up and throw it away before reading it.
- Only 0.63% of email from legit servers can be classified as “Commercial.” That either means commercial email marketers are not sending as much email (and “clogging up the intertubes”) as we all thought, or that they’re all sending from illegit or unknown servers, and not following best practices.
Then, they give two big whoppers of insight: