It takes more than a catchy subject line to get your email through to the customer. Habeas' CEO describes the collaboration necessary for making the system work.

"It takes a village to raise a child" is an old African proverb expressing the notion that it takes a diversity of talents, viewpoints and contributions from within a community to help foster a child's development.

I'm going to adapt this proverb for my own purposes and say, "It takes a village to make email work." Despite persistent problems -- more than 90 percent of email network traffic consists of spam and phishing for private information -- email still functions extremely well.

There are a lot of participants across the messaging industry who work together (sometimes well, sometimes not so well) to keep email up and running. Being at MAAWG's (Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group) summit in Dublin in June was an opportunity to see a diverse mix of messaging industry people -- from all over the globe and from different industry areas -- cooperating to ensure email's continued viability. In that spirit, I'd like to run down a short list of the major players keeping email going, and their contributions to "the village":

1. ISPs: The email inbox receiving policies of the U.S.' big four (AOL, Yahoo!, Hotmail and Earthlink) are incredibly important for most B2C senders, and therefore receive a tremendous amount of industry attention. If a big ISP wants senders to jump, and it'll drive improved inbox delivery, the answer from senders is "how high?" ISPs have the tough job of protecting their customers from spam and phishing, which makes legitimate commercial deliverability a secondary consideration.

2. Anti-spam providers: Spam reared its ugly head as a big problem about six or seven years ago, and since then billions of dollars have been spent on anti-spam technology to keep it out of inboxes. It is a tough business. The spammers are smart and agile, which keeps development costs high and the competition fierce amongst email security vendors.

The good news is that inboxes now generally have less spam in them. The bad news is that spam levels are at an all-time high, above 90 percent. The implication from all of this anti-spam filtering is that the false positive rate (accidental blocking of legitimate email) will continue to be an issue for senders.

3. Standards groups: This refers to the messaging industry techies and industry groups that have been involved in setting the standards for email authentication. Email standards, much like politics and sausage-making, are best seen from afar. Nonetheless, according to data from Ironport, authentication deployment is reaching critical mass with 42 percent of internet email volume using SPF/SIDF and 14 percent using DK/DKIM. This is great progress and bodes well for email.

4. Senders: "Legitimate" senders, not the kind sending emails offering opportunities to help get gold bars out of Nigeria, are real businesses that are accountable and attempting to conduct commerce via email. The savvy amongst this group use best practices in their emailing: obtaining opt-in email permission, sending relevant content, unsubscribing recipients promptly and otherwise paying attention to all the myriad aspects of maintaining a good email reputation. Unfortunately, there are still many, many legitimate businesses that don't understand that in today's world, sending volume email is a privilege, not a right. These senders are often mistaken for spammers by ISPs and anti-spam providers, with disastrous results for their email delivery rates.

5. Reputation Service Providers: A new type of company has emerged in the last four to five years: the "Reputation Service Provider" (RSP). RSPs focus primarily on helping legitimate senders improve their ability to get their email into the inbox through adoption of best practices and standards. RSPs are like credit rating agencies for email, observing the behavior of large numbers of volume email senders and issuing a "credit score" on senders. These credit scores are then used by the senders as feedback to help improve their sending practices and by ISPs and anti-spam providers to determine how to handle incoming email (block? deliver? throttle?). Habeas is an RSP.

6. Consumers: Last, but certainly not least, are the recipients of emails: the consumers. If "Web 2.0" is about consumer empowerment, then consumers have been given the ultimate power when it comes to email: the right to vote. The "This Is Spam" button has become ubiquitous within popular web mail clients. Every time a consumer sees email he considers spam, for whatever reason, the email can be zapped out of his inbox forever with a mouse click.

Originally the This Is Spam button was intended to help identify "real" spam (you know, illegal prescription drug sales, et cetera). Now it has become a way for consumers to keep legitimate company email out of their inboxes. If a high enough percentage of consumers at an ISP vote they don't like foobar.com's email, foobar.com is going to have all of its email blocked at that ISP. It is the ultimate feedback mechanism to tell commercial senders they need to improve their email program practices, or else.

There are many more constituents in email. Blacklist companies, industry coalitions and forums, email software companies in many different application areas, email service providers; the list goes on. I'll save any thoughts on those companies for another day. But what's clear to me is email continues to be an invaluable communications and commerce medium, thanks to the efforts of a large and diverse village.

Des Cahill is CEO, Habeas. Read full bio.