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E-mailers can expect to see their campaigns’ open rates continue to fall, as Road Runner has become the latest Internet service provider to turn images off by default.

The ISP confirmed to e-mail deliverability consultancy Pivotal Veracity yesterday that it has been migrating its subscribers on its regional domains to a new e-mail interface that blocks images by default.

The company began migrating its last region, New York, to the new interface last week, Pivotal Veracity said in a memo to clients.

Road Runner was the fifth largest American ISP with 7.7 million subscribers as of November, according to ISP Planet.

In their battle against spam and viruses, e-mail inbox providers have been increasingly blocking images by default.

Other e-mail inbox providers with images off by default include: AOL, Hotmail/WLM, Yahoo!, GMAIL, Outlook 2007, and Outlook 2003

As a result of this trend, marketers have witnessed their open rates decline steadily over the last several years.

The reason: An e-mail is recorded as having been opened when the receiving computer calls for images from the sending machine. As a result, an e-mail with blocked graphics can be opened and not register as such. Likewise, an e-mail displayed in a preview pain with graphics activated will register as having been opened when the user may have spent just enough time on it to delete it.

“If you rely on open-rates as a key performance metric, keep in mind open-rates will decline substantially in those e-mail readers with images off because the invisible gif used to record opens is disabled,” said Pivotal Veracity in a memo to clients.

There are apparently two ways to have images displayed in Road Runner’s new e-mail interface: the subscriber clicks on the option to enable graphics for that particular message, or the subscriber changes his or her default settings to enable images for all messages.

This development makes it increasingly important that marketers do not rely on images to get their messages across. It also increases the usefulness of ALT-TAGs, which display a text description of an image when graphics are blocked.