Nothing provides more challenges for TrueDelta’s Car Reliability Survey than email, specifically getting it to the inboxes of people who’ve signed up to participate. Too often, it gets trapped by a “bulk” or spam filter.

Some filters are better than others. The worst routinely identify TrueDelta’s email as spam, even though we send no spam and are on no blacklists. Luckily, many people with the worst filters have learned to check their spam folder often–which sort of defeats the purpose. (I receive quite a few email responses from members with [SPAM] inserted into the subject line by some indiscrimate filtering program or another.)

I had been thinking that gmail’s spam filter was perhaps the best, as it rarely had a false positive (identify non-spam as spam). We tend to have a much higher response rate with gmail users than with the users of other free email services.

But this might be changing. Lately I’ve noticed gmail putting some email from members to me into my spam folder. And, what do you know, last night while checking through the spam folder I found the email for Consumer Reports’ auto survey.

Seems this problem threatens them at least as much as it does us.