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A significant percentage of marketers are seriously lacking in fundamentals when it comes to e-mail, according to recent studies.

First, almost a quarter of retailers send e-mails that are unintelligible when images are blocked, according to a study published by the Direct Marketing Association’s E-mail Experience Council Thursday.

In order to protect people from being exposed to unwanted pornographic images and protect their computers from viruses and malware, e-mail inbox providers have been increasingly blocking images and disabling links in oncoming e-mail by default. As a result, marketers who don’t design e-mail to be readable when images are blocked are likely sending the majority of their customers garbage.

Also, there were significant variances in quality among those who designed their messages to be readable when images are off, the EEC said. Less than half of the retailers studied used what the EEC deemed to be a “good” mix of HTML and e-mail, the group said.

And along with news of significant designed flaws comes new that a significant portion of marketers are failing to engage new registrants properly.

Thirty five percent of the top 500 retailers in a recent study by e-mail service provider Silverpop failed to send any e-mail to new registrants within 30 days of signing up.

“Delaying a first send only confuses the recipient,” said Elaine O’Gorman, senior vice president of marketing and product strategy for Silverpop, in a statement. “If consumers have to wait for more than a month to receive the first e-mail message from a retailer, chances are they’ll have forgotten that they even registered with the company and will hit the spam button to keep such messages from reaching their inboxes in the future.”

Silverpop’s study is in agreement with a similar study by e-mail deliverability firm Return Path released last week which found that an astounding 60% of marketers failed to send “welcome” e-mails to new registrants and a third failed to send any e-mail to new registrants within 30 days of signup.

Silverpop’s study also found that nearly three-quarters of the companies in the Top 500 with e-mail programs offered no alternative to customers wishing to unsubscribe, such as a choice of other subscription topics or a change in frequency. Also, three out of four companies that had offered registrants choices when they opted-in failed to send them to a preference center to be given the option of changing their selections when they hit the unsubscribe link.