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Steve Cox, a member of the deliverability hub at the DMA's Email Marketing Council, which deals with getting messages into opted-in customers' inboxes, says a decision was reached last month to go public with the ISPA's withdrawal from a meet in March. It was due to be attended by Council members, including chair Chris Combemale.

The point of the meeting, says Cox, was to decide how the two sides could work together to help ISPs differentiate between spam and genuine, opt-in marketing emails. Until now, the approach of major email providers like AOL, MSN (via Hotmail) and Yahoo!, has been to develop 'whitelists' of senders whose emails can be counted on to be in line with privacy regulations.

Yet, Cox says that, even with whitelists, about 20 per cent of email campaigns are either not delivered or directed into users' junk folders where they are soon deleted. For email marketers, this is an enormous problem.

"Even when stuff does get through, if it is topped and tailed by Viagra and pornography, that's not a great representation of your brand," Cox adds.

And it's likely to get worse. As Nicholas Mann, MD of interactive agency Interdirect, writes in Revolution this month (p14), anti-spam initiative Spamhaus reports that 'improvements' to Send-Safe, the software said to be used for sending 70 per cent of spam, could mean that 95 per cent of all email will be 'spam' by the mid-2006.

Mann explains: "Send-Safe (can be used to) take control of broadband-connected PCs, known as 'zombies', and send emails. Since this happens in the background of the zombie computer, users are unlikely to be aware of a problem. But, now, Send-Safe can disguise the origin of the spam to make it appear that it's coming from the zombies' ISPs instead of the infected machines."

That makes it nigh impossible to trace the source of the spam; to block them, ISPs will have to block emails from themselves.

Paul Wood, chief information security analyst at spam blocking specialist MessageLabs, says: "ISPs are in a difficult position as they are just a carrier and not responsible for the content of emails sent over their systems." Yet, the DMA argues that they should be responsible for delivering genuine emails.

Chris Combemale, chair of the DMA Email Marketing Council, says: "ISPs are blocking a good percentage of legitimate emails and therefore creating a negative commercial impact (for advertisers) and not fulfilling their contract with their customers."

But ISPs' counter-argument is simple: to better distinguish between spam and marketing messages would cost, and they have a bigger need to clear inboxes of spam. They say the onus for deliverability lies not with them but with the senders.

A spokesperson says: "ISPs felt in essence that (the proposals) were not going to combat spam ... It's important for people who opt-in to receive their emails, but it becomes the responsibility of the sender to properly construct them and send them in the right way, so it isn't classed as spam."

But, Mike Parry, MD of IPT's email broadcast arm Email-Bureau, counters: "The onus for deliverability would lie with us if we knew what sensors we have to get over, but that's not available to us - it's trial and error."

The two have reached an impasse: the ISPA says a new meeting will not be arranged unless there are new proposals; the DMA says the ISPA should put forward its own proposals.

Clearly, the DMA needs to find a financial driver that persuades ISPs to help deliver legitimate emails. The one weapon it does have - clients' cash - has yet to be unsheathed. "On the one hand, (ISPs) are selling advertising to major brands, but on the other they're not delivering their emails," says Cox.

Combemale goes further: "It should be in their interest to meet with a trade body that represents some of their largest customers who, at the moment, are not happy with their marketing communications not being delivered. If the Post Office was not delivering 20 per cent of direct mail, you can bet the trade body responsible for its biggest spenders would have something to say. And you can bet the PO would sit down to discuss it."

The DMA's decision to go public is testament to its seriousness that email deliverability is an issue worth discussing.