Focus On: Email

A powerful emarketing tool combines eyeball motion studies with heatmapping display to help sellers bump sales. Unfortunately, when the conclusions derived from email heatmaps are liberally applied, phishers and other evil-doers benefit from the camouflage required to do evil properly. Email Battles tells you how to undo the evil, whether intentional or otherwise.

The admins at Microsoft IT make their anti-spam strategy brutally clear: They depend, first and foremost, on the anti-spam technique most riddled with inaccuracies, failures and outright corruption: blocklisting. Email Battles compares Microsoft's first-contact blocklisting technique with first-contact deferral. While both methods get you to the same net delivery rate, one is far more likely to deliver the mail you want.

Way back in 2003, a survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project concluded that while over 32 million Americans had exchanged health-related email, only 7% had exchanged messages with their doctors or health professionals. Three years later, while a huge segment of America uses email, over 60% of the medical community still refuses to engage. Email Battles explores the dangers of email, as doctors see them.

The State of Sender Pay: While GoodMail struggles to keep AOL and Yahoo on the Sender Pay farm, Google issues an unequivocal refusal to take money for bypassing GMail filters. Still, Return Path thinks there's a buck to be made with a broken-down fixer-upper like Bonded Sender. Email Battles takes a stab at making sense of the whole mess.

One of the epic battles of the 21st Century centers around Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail, as in either a) which is better, or; b) which is worse. It all depends on your perspective. Email Battles found itself embroiled in that flame war last week, when it profiled Yahoo! Mail's servers. Y! fans demanded that other email services be compared, particularly Hotmail. Here we go again.