According to a shocking survey by Pivotal Veracity, brought to you by the gurus at Marketing Sherpa, the vast majority of subject lines - more than 50 percent - come through as garbled, feature poor spacing or display strange symbols. The article not only explains the problem (formatting), but shows how to make sure it doesn’t happen to you. Click here to read more.

Jeanne Jennings, one of the gurus at Clickz, wants email marketing users to stop asking questions that need not be answered. Her latest fascinating piece shoots holes in the bloated importance of absolute open rates, the fascination with opt-out list building practices and the dilemma of gathering email outside of Internet sites. Click here to read more.

Marketing Sherpa, one of the best resources for direct marketing news, held a summit earlier this year where the main topic was - you guessed it - email marketing. The event featured email marketers from across the globe and addressed a king’s ransom of industry dilemmas including list size, whether or not to use images in your campaign, and the proper frequency of sends. Click here to read more.

Direct Marketing News has an interesting story on spam, courtesy of Symantec. Symantec analyzed email throughout the month of May and found that while image-rich spam is down to around 16 percent of emails, phishing, spoofing and other fraudulent email techniques are on the rise. The image spam decrease is the good news, showing that many ISPs are using sophisticated techniques to block these messages. But 419 spam continues to evolve well beyond the usual scam of asking for cash to get more cash. Click here to read more.