Forty-five years since the first email was delivered–and we still can’t get email delivery right? Yes, according to the 2016 Deliverability Report from email consultancy Return Path, the rate of business promotional emails making it through to an inbox actually declined in a year, from 78% in Q2 2015 to 69% in Q2 2016.

In Q2 2016, 7% of email messages went to spam filters and 24% went missing.

Partly, these failures are due to sloppy list management; businesses let lists grow old without pruning inactive subscribers. Partly, too, major mailbox providers like Google and Yahoo have toughened their standards, carefully watching how much or little subscribers click on emails and blocking or passing on the messages accordingly.

Read about the Return Path deliverability study.

Learn more:

Avoiding the Dreaded Spam Label

A Very Monty Python Guide to Email Spam Filters and Blacklists