Saturday, June 11, 2005 4:00 AM
Marketing Sherpa.com has released an interesting
study entitled
54% of Permission Emailers Are Filtered as Spammers: Including AOL News, Wal-Mart, IBM and the Feds.
From personal experience with both commercial enterprise-grade spam filter software as well as free web-based email such as Hotmail and Gmail, I have seen a significant number of legitimate emails caught in the spam filter, never to arrive in my inbox (unless I make the effort to go find it and then okay it for delivery). I even recall notifying my local public television station that it might want to modify its monthly email newsletter, because it was not getting through my filters.
Applying this to legal, I wonder how many law firms are blast mailing a monthly email newsletter, only to have a large percentage of them filtered out before they reach the intended recipient? Worse, unless the firm is specifically tracking filtering (not necessarily an easy thing to do, I am told), it may not even know its newsletter was not received.
Hoping that intended recipients will regularly check their spam cache to release "stuck" emails is not really a satisfactory answer. Especially, noting that it normally takes less than a week for a enterprise-grade spam filter cache to capture a thousand or more emails--do people have the time or inclination to regularly sort through these to find and release a couple of newsletters?
There are a lot of great companies working to resolve this issue and find ways to ensure that email is received as intended. But, when you see a study noting that big, Fortune 500 companies (which are presumably investing heavily to ensure email is received) are struggling with this issue, it makes you stop and think.
Perhaps this is where syndication technologies like RSS will step up. Whether used in combination with email, by itself or in conjunction with some other as-yet-developed technology, RSS seems to offer significant potential in delivering content while avoiding spam filters. Stay tuned.