Friends Reunited tackles 1 in 4 emails blocked

Friends Reunited has boosted its inbox deliverability rate by nearly 40 per cent after just one month of working with email experts Return Path.


27 per cent of around 30 million emails sent by the social network every month were going missing completely - totally undelivered, not in its subscribers’ spam folders or inboxes – and one in twenty (5.7 per cent) were ending up in subscribers’ spam folders. The number of emails going missing or being delivered to spam folders has now fallen dramatically to just 7.5 per cent.

The figures reflect Return Path’s findings that social networks’ email is marked as spam 100 per cent more often than email from other sectors. Social networking sites suffer from this comparatively poor email reputation due to high volumes of spam complaints. This often results in them becoming so-called ‘friendly fire casualties’ with many of their emails being blocked at ISP level.

Friends Reunited has engaged Return Path’s comprehensive set of monitoring tools in an effort to better understand why their emails are being marked as spam. Friends Reunited's Chief Technical Officer, Duncan Careless, has described email deliverability and reputation as ‘imperative’ to the growth of their subscriber base and to keep in touch with their users.

Friends Reunited and Return Path say they will continue to work together closely to achieve 100 per cent email inbox deliverability.