Are Fears About Email Deliverability Founded In Reality?

Over the past few months I've been observing a few things happening that make me wonder...

• Many of the more recent Butterfly Marketing script based sites are set up so they won't accept signups from yahoo, hotmail and gmail addresses. Some other sites ask you not to sign up with such accounts. The marketers in question will tell you their mail will never get through to your inbox if you use one of these accounts, and to use a "proper" ISP email account instead.

• People considering what kind of autoresponders to choose are bombarded with fear tactics and told there is only one choice if they want their mail to get delivered.

• I have a yahoo, a hotmail and a gmail account and have been keeping an eye on the behavior of their respective spam filtering systems.

So far, every list I've ever subscribed to with any of these email addresses has been able to reach me and most of the time straight into my inbox. And I haven't even bothered to whitelist any! About 10% goes to the junk folder for the first one or two times, but the spam filters listen well to what I teach them and do their job very accurately. Overall I'm getting less than 0.5% both false positives and false negatves.

It also doesn 't seem to matter much which autoresponder is used, I see many different ones after clicking confirmation links. They're all getting delivered.

From the marketer's perspective, I have reason to believe that deliverability to yahoo, hotmail and gmail is actually much better than to ISP-based email addresses. The anti-SPAM protection mechanisms employed by ISP's seem to be so stringent and cumbersome these days that even a letter from your grandma is lucky to get through. So I would actually encourage readers to use gmail or yahoo as their primary account for receiving newsletters. (Hotmail has other reliability issues that don't seem to have anything to do with spam-filtering.)

Then there is the question of which autoresponder? So far it looks like six of one, half a dozen of the other. To take the observations a bit further on this one, I'm going to start keeping track of how many from each service or script get shunted to the junk folder the first , second etc. time round. That way it should become easy to see if any patterns emerge. Stay tuned for updates.

:-) Nicole