A report from Return Path, a Colorado company that monitors email deliverability, states that in the last six months of the year 2009, almost twenty percent of commercial emails sent with the recipient’s permission never reached the intended customers in Canada and the United States.

Permissioned email made it to the inboxes of only around eighty percent of its intended addressees , which was a tiny .08 percent increase from the first six months of 2009. 16.3 percent of these emails went missing without any notification of non-delivery, while 3.5 percent of the emails ended up in spam or junk folders of consumers in the United States and Canada.

Europe fared a bit better, for around 85 percent of the emails sent made it to the inboxes of consumers in that country. Nearly 4 percent of the emails ended up being dumped into someone’s bulk or junk folder, while 11 percent of sent emails went missing and were never located. The Asia Pacific area had the best email delivery rate at all, with an almost 87 percent of emails reaching the intended party.

George Bilbrey, the Co-founder and President of Return Path says that the company had many discussions about how inbox placement rates can affect ROI, and that the discussions would continue into 2010. He claims that many marketers who plan a marketing campaign that includes sending out emails think that they are attaining a delivery rate of 95 to 98 percent. However, the company’s Email Deliverability Benchmark Report clearly shows that those who are sending marketing emails do not as yet have the proper data needed to determine the true ROI in an accurate manner.

It is common for those sending emails to count just the hard bounces as failed emails, but this is not an accurate method to determine the number of emails that made it to the inboxes of subscribers. Remember, the only emails that can turn prospective customers into active customers are emails that are opened and read.

In the United States, the top five Internet Service Providers that had problems with emails reaching their recipients were BellSouth, Gmail, MSN, Hotmail, and Yahoo. In the UK, the top five problem ISPs are Demon, BT Internet, AOL, Orange, and Yahoo.

Canada’s top five ISPs that have problems with undeliverable mail were Primus.ca, Shaw, SaskTel, MTS, and Bell. Primus.ca is in first place, as it uses Postini as part of its filtering system, and did not deliver 55 percent of the emails sent by marketers to those using the ISP. This was a 2 percent increase from the first six months of 2009.