According to a recent report, the textual content of emails isn’t what prevents deliverability a good deal of the time.

Many marketers believe that “spammy” content is the culprit; but complaints from recipients, the excessive use of images and using “from” lines containing numbers or symbols are the most prevalent reasons for non-deliverability, says Lyris Technologies in their latest ISP Deliverability Report Card.

A Lyris representative stated that when marketers are faced with deliverability issues, the common reaction is for them to try and figure out how to get past the spam filters, rather than focus on the quality and relevancy of the email they are sending out.

Currently, the top major ISP’s most likely to route permission based email to a users junk folder, in order of frequency, are:

- XO Concentric 48.34%
- Bell South 28.29%
- Gmail 27.75%
- Yahoo! 18.61%
- Hotmail 16.16%

I found it interesting that HotMail wasn’t higher up the list given some of the recent reports from companies having huge problems communicating with Hotmail users - but then I realized; the list above was based on routing permission based email to junk folders, not blackholing the email altogether :).

Read more of the Lyris Deliverability Scorecard report

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