Recent studies show that opt-in messages (that is, e-mail that people have asked to receive) are now erroneously blocked as spam by ISPs and e-mail services at rates of 17% (according to a Return Path study) to 38% (Mail.com study). Let me repeat: 17% to 38% of the e-mail you send out to customers who ask for it -- or even pay for it -- does not reach them. Sometimes it gets shuttled into a "junk" folder where it probably won't be seen by the subscriber; sometimes it's just unceremoniously deleted without the subscriber's knowledge, or the publisher's (since the filters often don't send bounce messages that would let you know what's happening).
Of the subscribers (62% to 83%) who do successfully receive e-mail from ethical publishers, there's another big chunk who don't open it. The typical opt-in commercial/marketing message is opened only about 40% of the time, according to the most recent Doubleclick E-mail Trend Report. E-mail newsletters typically fare better, but nevertheless a lot of them sit unopened. As users' in-boxes fill up with more and more junk, it's common for people to simply miss asked-for mail and inadvertently delete it -- or because of information overload, simply not have time to read it.
Don't expect it to get better anytime soon - with the flood of "security update" virii coming at me, I'm in full bore auto-delete mode - who knows how many mails I might have actually wanted have been deleted. Just like the badly behaved child in grade school, the spammers and virus writers are ruining email for the rest of the class. I find more and more that I'm using RSS and IM for communication. Content producers are starting to realize that there's a problem - look for more and more content to move to RSS.
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