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Read more commentary from Ken Magill

Nearly 18% of permission-based e-mail sent in the fourth quarter of 2007 was diverted into recipients’ spam folders, according to the latest deliverability study by e-mail service provider Lyris.

This study, however, covers a period before Comcast and Yahoo fiddled with their spam filtering and began mucking up everybody’s campaigns.

In any case, the American Internet service provider with the best delivery rate in the fourth quarter of 2007 was AIM.com with 93% of permission-based messages hitting the inbox, according to Lyris.

Roadrunner was a close second with 92% of permission-based messages making it into people’s inboxes, Lyris reported.

The American ISP most likely to junk permission-based messages was XO Concentric, according to Lyris, with 62% of permission based messages sent to its subscribers getting diverted into their junk folders.

Yahoo, MSN Network and Hotmail all shunted around 21% of wanted e-mails into people’s spam folders, according to Lyris.

Matt Blumberg, CEO of deliverability concern Return Path said Lyris’s numbers are in line with those observed by his company.

“It’s a little lower than our measurements,” he said. “We would say it’s probably 20 to 22%.”

Also, the numbers haven’t moved much from quarter to quarter, according Stefan Pollard, the author of Lyris’s study.

“That’s not really surprising,” he said. “We tried to find some distinctions but all the things we know are impacting senders aren’t showing up in that report. For example, we know Yahoo has made some filtering changes and we know they’ve had some problems but none of that is in the report because it’s a Q4 report.”

Yahoo apparently had some staffing changes on its postmaster team and made some tweaks to its spam filtering, resulting in more permission-based mail getting treated as spam.

As a result, Yahoo has been so swamped with postmaster troubleshooting forms—forms submitted by mailers who think their messages are getting wrongly blocked—it is taking anywhere from one to three weeks for mailers to get answers.

“On our end we are throwing more people at the problem and have made several changes to the inbound mail system, which should have us caught up soon,” wrote Ryan K, on Yahoo’s mail blog.

Also, Comcast in February began blocking an inordinate amount of permission-based e-mail, according to multiple sources. And that blip isn’t accounted for on Lyris’s fourth-quarter study, either.

“Mailers really need to be monitoring this stuff,” said Pollard. “There are things that, while they sometimes may be out of their control, they need to be able to explain to their CEO what’s going on. Yahoo makes tweaks on its filters and it impacts 13 to 15% of your list, and your ROI takes a hit for the month of February, you better be able to explain why.”

Those who haven’t already should bookmark Yahoo’s mail blog. Here’s a link: http://www.ymailblog.com/