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So lemme get this straight: It’s been 10 years since e-mail emerged as a serious marketing medium and we still have no consensus on what “delivered” means? Are you kidding me?

And here I thought e-mail—a channel that returned $57.25 for every dollar spent on it in 2005, according to the Direct Marketing Association—was getting no respect from chief marketers because it is such an iffy medium for prospecting.

Turns out CMOs think e-mail managers are all a bunch of drool-bucket morons and have simply been too polite to say so.

Why? Even the most fundamental e-mail metric of them all, the delivery rate, has no standard definition, according to a survey conducted by the deliverability roundtable of the Email Experience Council, a for-profit organization aimed at promoting standardization in the e-mail industry.

Seventy nine percent of e-mail service providers surveyed defined “delivered” by deducting all failures from total mailed, while 21% calculated it by deducting hard bounces—where the address no longer exists.

E-mail marketers were in even further discord on the “delivered” metric, as 63% defined it as total failures subtracted from total mailed, 11% defined it as simply total mailed and 10% defined “delivered” as only those e-mails that made it into the recipients’ inboxes versus their spam folders.

“That was the scariest finding of all,” said Deirdre Baird, roundtable chair and chief executive of deliverability consultancy Pivotal Veracity. “There’s a wide variation in how delivered is calculated and yet it’s central to everything we do in this business.”

Baird was being polite. How can an industry that can’t even agree on how to measure the number of pieces delivered expect to command any respect during the budget-creation process? Chief marketers consistently cite measuring their efforts as their No. 1 challenge. How are they supposed to react when the guy in charge of what has been touted as the most measurable channel of all time can’t even say with any authority how much mail is getting delivered?

But wait, it gets better. Even scarier was the finding that there is also no consensus on how to calculate the number of messages that were mailed, according to Dave Lewis, project co-chair and vice president, market development, StrongMail.

“Even on ‘how many did you mail?’ there’s no consensus,” he said. “Are you talking about the size of your list and how many attempts you made? Or are you talking about how many times you tried to mail? If you’ve got a million-record list, are you mailing a million? Or are you mailing 3 million because you tried each one three times?”

A lack of consensus on such fundamental metrics has a seriously damaging ripple effect across the industry, said Baird and Lewis. “It has a cascade effect,” said Lewis.

How can we measure the click rate if we have no idea how many were sent or delivered? Oh, wait a minute. I almost forgot. There’s no consensus on what a click rate is either.

Forty two percent of e-mail service providers calculate click rate by dividing unique clickers by total delivered while 25% calculate it by dividing unique clickers by total opens and 8% divide clickers by total mailed. Is that total mailed according to the size of the file or total mailed according to number of attempts? Who the hell knows?

What we do know is that until we can arrive at a consensus on some extremely fundamental definitions, every number that comes out of this industry has no meaning and, therefore, cannot be taken seriously.

Think about this next time the chief marketer sets aside 3% of the total budget for e-mail, pats you on the head and sends you on your way.

Why the CMO Thinks You're an Idiot: Part II