Reality: Marketers, particularly those new to email or who have transitioned from the offline world, are shocked at how the email ecosystem -- ISPs, corporate networks, spam filters and blacklists -- can control their email delivery and rendering.

Some even try to claim their First Amendment rights should permit their emails to be delivered without interference.

Wrong. ISPs are private companies whose first priority is protecting their subscribers/users, and companies work hard to keep unwanted emails out of their employees' inboxes. Recent court decisions have upheld the right of ISPs and corporations to determine which emails will and will not be delivered and in what shape.

So, marketers complain that these gatekeepers control their delivery destiny, and they can do nothing to affect it. Or, they believe that ESPs somehow magically drive their delivery rates.

In fact, while attaining 100 percent delivery may be difficult, routinely getting 95 to 98 percent of your emails delivered to the inbox is quite achievable.

There is, however, no magic pixie dust to sprinkle on the email list to get high delivery rates. It simply requires following well-publicized best practices, including:

• Obtaining subscriber permission
• Authenticating your emails
• Performing regular list hygiene
• Minimizing spam complaints
• Actively monitoring and managing your sender reputation
• Immediately removing hard bounces, unsubscribe requests and spam complaints
• Eliminating coding errors
• Checking for and removing spammy-looking content and design approaches (e.g., single large images) that may get your messages blocked or filtered.