At EmailTooltester, we’ve always recognized the importance of measuring email deliverability, which is why we’ve been running deliverability tests on all the major email marketing services for the past 6 years.
Key findings:
- The average email deliverability rate across the 15 ESPs we tested was 83.1%
- Which means 16.9% of all emails never reach the intended recipient’s inbox.
- On average, 10.5% of emails end up in the intended recipient’s spam folder
- 6.4% of emails go missing altogether and are considered “undelivered”
This means that nearly 1 in 6 marketing emails never reach the inbox!
What is a good email deliverability rate?
- An email deliverability rate of over 89% is considered good
- An email deliverability rate of over 95% is considered excellent
- An email deliverability rate of below 80% is considered poor
The 5 best email platforms for deliverability in 2026:
- Klaviyo (5*)
- Omnisend (4.5*)
- ActiveCampaign (4*)
- Moosend (4*)
- Kit (4*)
The 5 worst email platforms for deliverability in 2026:
- Brevo (4*)
- MailerLite (3.5*)
- GetResponse (3.5*)
- Beehiiv (3.5*)
- MailChimp (3*)
Email Delivery Latency (AKA Time to Delivery)
Inbox placement tells you where an email ends up, but there’s another important part of deliverability: how long it takes to get there. This is known as time to delivery or delivery latency.
Most emails arrive within seconds, but mailbox providers can temporarily delay or throttle messages, sometimes because of factors such as sender reputation or sending volume.
For time-sensitive emails, even a short delay can matter, and unusually long delivery times can also be an early sign of deliverability issues.
Using Email Detective data, we compared how quickly emails sent through different ESPs reached the recipient’s mailbox:
Which email platforms deliver fastest
Share of mail arriving within 30 seconds of leaving the sending server, measured from message headers.
| Platform | Arrives fast | Emails | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Salesforce MC | 100.0% | 5,040 | |
| SparkPost | 100.0% | 9,052 | |
| Marketo | 100.0% | 994 | |
| HubSpot | 99.9% | 4,073 | |
| ActiveCampaign | 99.9% | 1,327 | |
| Shopify Messaging | 99.9% | 1,191 | |
| Zendesk | 99.9% | 1,165 | |
| Brevo | 99.7% | 2,775 | |
| Postmark | 99.7% | 2,142 | |
| Mailgun | 99.6% | 13,161 |
Source: Email Detective — delivery speed, measured from real inboxes and updated daily.
Other email deliverability statistics
Every year, Validity.com (a leading provider of email deliverability tools) produce a useful email deliverability benchmark report. Below you’ll find a summary of some of the most interesting findings in 2026 (although there’s plenty more in the report).
Average email deliverability rate by ISP (Internet Service Provider):
- Google:
- 89.8% Inbox
- 6.4% Spam
- 3.8% Missing
- Microsoft (Outlook and Hotmail):
- 77.4% Inbox
- 15.1% Spam
- 7.5% Missing
- Yahoo:
- 87.3% Inbox
- 6.4% Spam
- 6.3% Missing
- Apple:
- 82% Inbox
- 10.8% Spam
- 7.2% Missing
These big four (Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Apple) make up 77% of relative market share, which means 8 out of 10 emails are processed by one of these providers. The differences in deliverability rates between these providers are a result of the different priorities and standards that each one applies to incoming emails.
We took this a step further and analyzed what proportion of political emails were being marked as spam per ISP and found some interesting results! Only 5.2% of Joe Biden’s emails ended up in spam, compared to 40% of Donald Trump’s emails – find out which ISPs favored which political party here.
Average email deliverability rate by Region:
- Europe: 91.1%
- Latin America: 88%
- Asia Pacific: 87.9%
- North America: 86.7%
Average email deliverability rate by Country:
- Germany: 97.5%
- France: 94.0%
- UK: 91.5%
- Canada: 89.4%
- Brazil: 89.0%
- China: 88.9%
- Australia: 87.8%
- United States: 86.8%
- India: 71.0%
The deliverability rates for the different regions and countries (in the statistics above) are based on local mail providers rather than the big four of Google, Microsoft, Apple or Yahoo. The rules-based (rather than user data-based) filtering conditions often result in lower deliverability rates.
Regional anti-spam and data protection legislation (CAN-SPAM in the US, CASL in Canada, LGPD in Brazil, GDPR in Europe, etc.) and local customs may also account for some of the variations in deliverability rates.
The 5 best industries for deliverability in 2026:
- Transportation (97.2%)
- Energy, Utilities, & Waste (95.0%)
- Telecommunications (92.6%)
- Government (91.4%)
- Travel & Hospitality (90.8%)
The 5 worst industries for deliverability in 2026:
- Business Services (85.1%)
- Law Firms & Legal Services (82.1%)
- Consumer Services (81.2%)
- Healthcare Services (80.3%)
- Real Estate (80.1%)
What explains the variability in deliverability rates between different industries? Most likely, the receptiveness of the recipients to certain types of emails.
Speculative emails from real estate agents and healthcare companies to people who are are less interested in the current climate will have less engagement than more transactional emails from transport and utilities companies!
And higher engagement rates lead to higher deliverability rates.
Email Deliverability Statistics Summary
If you’re involved with email marketing, you need to keep on top of deliverability. It’s important that you’re aware of the kinds of deliverability rates that are excellent, good, or acceptable (and those that aren’t).
It’s important that you understand the various factors that affect email deliverability rates, the best practices that you should be following to get the highest possible deliverability rates, and the email marketing services with the most reliable deliverability.
The statistics in this article will hopefully give you a good benchmark to work from, but check back regularly, as email deliverability is in an ever-evolving state and the numbers change from year to year!
Related content: email spam statistics.