U.S. ISPs Improve Opt-in Email Delivery

BERKELEY, Calif.—Oct. 26, 2005—Lyris(R) Technologies, subsidiary of J.L. Halsey (OTCBB:JLHY) and leading provider of email marketing solutions, today announced improved delivery of permission-based email messages among 28 U.S. Internet and Email Service Providers in the third business quarter of 2005. Lyris publishes its findings today as part of its quarterly ISP Deliverability Report Card, documenting the delivery outcomes of over 45 thousand permission-based email messages sent to accounts at 41 major Internet Service Providers in the United States and Europe.

"While the average rate of email delivery remains high, the report also shows that performance at individual ISPs can vary dramatically," said Lyris Vice President Robb Wilson. "Companies with large in-house email lists should really be doing deliverability audits of their email campaigns on an ISP level."

"This can be particularly worthwhile with the larger providers, such as Yahoo and Hotmail," Wilson added.

Major ISPs garnering top deliverability scores in Q3 included PeoplePC, Mailblocks, and RoadRunner — each of which delivered over 95 percent of requested email to the recipient's inbox without mislabeling or filtering it as spam. Other top performing ISPs included Yahoo, Juno, and USA.net.

Hotmail and Gmail were the only U.S. providers to show a rise in rates of false positive filtering in the third quarter. Gmail's rate of inappropriate filtering rose from four to seven percent in Q3 while Hotmail's rate rose from five to nine percent. There is speculation that Hotmail's recent implementation of Sender ID may be responsible for the rise.

Lyris' report was based on 45,415 permission-based email messages monitored by the Lyris EmailAdvisor service over a three-month period from July to September. Examples of email publications monitored by the report include a wine tasting club's weekly bulletin, a professional sports team's monthly newsletter, a national retailer's monthly product bulletin, a lobbying group's political alerts, and a non-profit's posting of treatment advances for neurological disease. In all cases, recipient accounts made an explicit "opt-in" request to receive the messages tracked in the study. For a copy of the complete report, please visit our Knowledge Center

About Lyris Technologies

As a member of the J.L. Halsey family (OTCBB:JLHY) of email technology pioneers, Lyris Technologies joins Sparklist and EmailLabs in providing leading-edge email marketing solutions to the industry's largest, most diverse array of customers. Lyris' flagship product, Lyris ListManager, is one of the world's best-selling software solutions for email marketing while Lyris ListHosting offers the same powerful capabilities in the form of an on-demand web-based service.