Delivery Failure

Return Path, an e-mail marketing firm, has been tracking the deliverability statistics of opt-in e-mail blasts for several years and the numbers just don't seem to improve hugely:

Top ISPs and web-based email providers did not deliver 21 percent of permission-based emails to consumers’ inboxes during the first half of 2005, according to a new Return Path email deliverability study. In 2004, 22 percent of permission-based email was not delivered to consumers’ inboxes.

Remember: this isn't spam we're talking about, but e-mail subscriptions that people have deliberately signed up for.

Score 1 for print. Say what you want about the Post Office, but print direct mail gets delivered more than 99% of the time.