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If the latest statistics are correct, a staggering 65 per cent of emails are spam, and it's a figure that continues to rise. But while it's frustrating for the consumer who can only handle so many offers for penis enlargements and Viagra, it's also a growing source of frustration for email marketers. The blocking techniques being adopted by many ISPs mean that legitimate email traffic is being grouped with more insidious mail, and is not getting through.

"Deliverability is the single largest issue for email marketers in the US and it will become so in the UK as well," says Denis Sheehan, CEO of email marketing firm CheetahMail. "It's invisible if your system can't see what's happening and you don't have a relationship with the ISPs."

Industry experts say it's a significant issue, with estimates of anything from 10 per cent to a third of legitimate emails being stopped.

What makes legitimate opt-in email broadcasts seem like spam could be a mixture of the size of the broadcast and the words they contain. Daniel Mothersdale, marketing director at Brightmail EMEA, believes the technology should be in place to distinguish between spam and false positives (legitimate emails flagged up as spam). He claims few genuine emails are stopped, by Brightmail at least. "We measure spam through a number of sources and protect 300 million mailboxes," he says. "Our false positive rating is very high in terms of what we identify - only one in a billion is a mistake."

So is the issue overplayed? From the ISP's perspective, deciding what to stop and what to let through is a tricky task. They have a responsibility to keep spam out for the good of everyone, but it's also a commercial necessity - it costs them money every time they process an email so they don't want to waste it by letting large volumes of fraudulent mail through.

"If you're an ISP, one out of every two emails you receive hasn't been requested by the address it's sent to, and to deliver all those, you would have to double your capacity," says Skip Fidura, director of European operations at Digital Impact. While he believes ISPs have made a legitimate business decision in setting up a system to block spam, he acknowledges that this can cause problems: "Unfortunately others get caught in the net too - it's a bit like throwing the baby out with the bath water," he says.

To bypass this, marketers need to know what ISPs block on so they can work round it. The IP address is one of them. Mike Parry, managing director of EmailBureau, explains: "Each email server has an IP address. When you send a volume of email down an IP address, it's monitored by the ISP.

When someone complains they're being spammed, the IP address it's coming from is filtered against it as while domains can change, IP addresses can't." This can be a problem for marketers sharing IP addresses. "It's like sharing needles," says Parry. "If they're affected, you're affected."

Mind your language

The language in an email is another reason for messages not getting through.

But knowing what to avoid is a challenge as ISPs' hit lists change daily. Generally though, emails are scored on a number of things, including the position of words in relation to each other as well as image content.

"The IP address is only a small part of it. Most ISPs aren't just using these for blocking methods but are also looking at the content of the email and pattern matching with other emails. They combine this with other issues to build up a score to decide if it looks like spam," explains Mike Austin, technical director at Email Reaction.

To combat this, marketers can score their emails themselves so any potential problems reveal themselves. It's also a good idea to test campaigns by sending them to a range of ISP accounts before full rollout.

There are other simple things marketers can do, according to Rick Buck, director of privacy and ISP relations at e-dialog. "Getting people to put them in their address book trumps filtering at ISP level. And the relevance of message helps - if it's something customers are looking for and are interested in, the more likely they are to go through."

EmailBureau has developed Email Monitor, a suite of four tools that help users test creative for likely spam triggers, clean email lists, track delivery and develop closer relationships with ISPs. One of its tools, Mailbox Monitor, provides real-time delivery tracking to the top ISPs so users know whether they've been blocked or have reached their intended destination.

Email Reaction also provides the tools to help its clients navigate through this tricky field with its solution, Email Reaction ASP. This provides an email broadcast platform, content management tools, data management and crucially deliverability tests, including tests through all major ISPs' systems.

More tools are being developed all the time. Last year, the focus was very much on passing legislation to deal with the spam flood - the Privacy & Electronic Communications Directive came into play in December, designed to help cut levels of unwanted emails by enforcing opt-in.

Accountability

But so far, it doesn't seem to have stemmed the flow, and one of the most serious issues is that of authenticating the sender of an email.

"It's not currently possible to prove that the person who's sending the email is actually the source of that email," says Austin. "Once we can enforce accountability spam will be reduced." This fact is leading to the development of authenticating tools such as Caller ID.

Whatever solution marketers go for, the difficulty for ISPs is finding a balance between cutting out the spam and letting in the important emails. "What's driving ISPs to block are levels of spam. For our industry, creating a situation where ISPs can block more is moving forward, but we have to do it in a way to let opted-in emails get through," says Fidura.

And for email marketers, getting their messages through isn't brain surgery; it should be quite simple. Sheehan is one of many in the industry with little sympathy for those getting blocked. "ISPs are doing their best - spam is a horrendous problem. I have zero sympathy for anyone who's sending out emails and suffering with this."

As e-dialog's Buck says: "If emails are done correctly, following the rules and regulations and putting through the necessary disclosures and authenticity, then mail should get through."

BOOK CLUB ASSOCIATES IN EMAIL DRIVE

BCA is a long-time user of email marketing, using it as an acquisition tool and to communicate with existing customers. In the last six months it has noticed deliverability issues and is using EmailBureau's EmailMonitor tool to help counteract them.

"The key things we're looking at are ensuring consistent messaging so people know what to expect, being smarter with our creative - using text rather than images, and testing whether messages are acceptable to ISPs before sending them out in bulk," says Farhad Koodoruth, head of interactive marketing at BCA. "We're also trying to get our members to add us to their address book.

"We currently send our customer emails through another provider and EmailMonitor's MessageCheck software checks our content is clean, highlighting problems quickly and speeding up our creative processes. We use its delivery testing software, particularly on larger sends, to make sure there's no delivery issue and that the IP addresses we use are clean. Delivery software is key because we share IP addresses and while we try hard to be good, that's not necessarily the case with other users. With it, we can make sure we're not queued up on an IP address, and can raise issues with ISPs quickly.

In the past we could measure uplift in sales and any changes in our response matrix but it was hard to pinpoint what we'd done right or wrong. We might have seen low open or click rates and thought it just wasn't a good campaign - now we've got a much clearer picture of what's going on."