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The Direct Marketing Association’s Email Experience Council has taken over the Email Measurement Accuracy Coalition, it was announced today.

The EMAC was launched last April as an industry wide effort to standardize e-mail metrics. The effort—headed by JupiterResearch’s e-mail analyst David Daniels—came on the heels of multiple reports revealing that many fundamental e-mail metrics lack standard definitions.

For example, marketers lacked agreement on the meaning of delivery rate—probably the most fundamental metric in the business, according to a survey conducted last year by the EEC.

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

E-mail marketers were in even further discord on the “delivered” metric, as 63% in last year’s survey defined delivered 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.

According to a joint statement from the EEC and the EMAC earlier today, the coalition has standardized e-mail delivery metrics and will publish them “in the coming weeks.”

Next, the EMAC will work to arrive at standard definitions of click-through, click-to-open and other metrics, the statement said.