October 14, 2004 | Read Time: 1 minute
A new study of 40 nonprofit organizations found that at least one in five e-mail messages sent over seven months was misclassified as spam.
Mindshare Interactive Campaigns, a company in Washington, used five accounts to subscribe to e-mail lists maintained by 40 nonprofit organizations. The company checked the accounts — set up with America Online, EarthLink, Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo — weekly from January 9 until August 10, logging how many e-mails were correctly delivered to the accounts’ inboxes, erroneously routed to a spam or bulk-mail folder, or not delivered at all. (The company determined the number of messages that weren’t delivered by comparing the messages sent to the five e-mail accounts. If some of the messages were not delivered to all five accounts, the number of misclassified e-mail messages might be even higher than one in five.)
During that time, 711 — or 21 percent — of the 3,371 messages that the organizations sent didn’t make it into the inboxes of the test accounts. Thirteen percent were filtered erroneously by the Internet service provider, while 8 percent were incorrectly filtered by a software program being used by one of the accounts. At least one message from each organization was misclassified.
The study also suggested that the number of messages classified as spam is growing. In January, only 11 percent of messages weren’t delivered or were routed to a spam folder, compared with 21 percent in mid-July to August.
For more information: Go to http://www.mindshare.net.
