Here at GetInterviews, we send out a lot of emails and I mean a LOT. We don't have a subscription list for a newsletter or anything, but 99% of our business is completed via email from initial contact to final delivery. We are not spammers and never send out bulk emails in big batches. In fact, we don't send out bulk email at all. Everything that goes out through our server is what I might refer to as person to person rather than person to masses.
Over the past few months, our battle with spam filters has grown more heated. A good estimate is that approximately 20% of our emails get eaten by spam filters of the big commercial services such as Yahoo, Hotmail, Gmail, and Earthlink. We have job seekers who request a free resume critique to whom we respond -- only they never receive our response. Often we try responding multiple times with no luck getting through. That leaves the job seeker thinking we are unresponsive and us feeling extremely frustrated.
Keep in mind that we are in a service business so we go the extra mile to reach customers and provide them with the information they need for a successful job search. Recruiters and hiring managers, on the other hand, are not so considerate nor do they care. If they send an email to you (most respond first by email) and they do not receive a response, they just move on to the next candidate. They don't waste the time to chase down job candidates when they have 200 other resumes of qualified candidates before them.
The large commercial email providers such as I mentioned above have proven to be the most vicious in their spam filtering according to our experience. Earthlink has even added a second step where the sender has to log in online and tell what the email is about so it can be approved. This narrow opportunity expires very quickly so if the sender doesn't respond almost immediately, the original email is tossed out. That can be tough if you send out an email at 4:49 on a Friday and don't get back to your computer until Monday morning at 8:00. You have to start the process all over!
When you are starting a job search, consider NOT using one of the free email services just because of the potential for multiple missed job opportunities. If you have high speed service through a provider such as Comcast, Hughes, Time Warner, or your telephone provider, you probably have the ability to have multiple email addresses on your account. Set up an email on that service just for your job search purposes rather than going the freebie route. Sure, you are going to get spam but you are going to get spam anyway, no matter what kind of email service you are using. What is less likely to happen is that real, important messages WILL NOT be filtered out, and thus you won't miss the opportunities you are seeking in the first place.