According to Return Path’s latest Deliverability Benchmark Report, only 79.3% of commercial, permissioned emails reached the inboxes in the United States and Canada during the first half of 2009. With the undelivered email, 3.3% is routed to a "junk" or "bulk" email folder and 17.4% is not delivered at all - with no hard bounce message or other notification of non-delivery.

Some other interesting findings from the study include:

• The US deliverability rates are slightly better than Canada with an average of 82% inbox placement rate, while Canada's inbox placement rates are lower with just 75% of commercial, permissioned emails reaching consumers' inboxes.
• Reaching business addresses, which are protected by systems like Postini, Symantec and MessageLabs, is even more difficult: on average only 72.4% of commercial email is delivered to the inbox through these enterprise systems!
• In the US, the toughest inboxes to reach are those at MSN, Hotmail and Gmail

Read the press release here and download the study here.