Digital + Social

The Salt Lake Tribune last week chimed in on the debate over Utah’s so-called child-protection do-not-e-mail registry with a house editorial headlined, “Not for a child’s eyes: Registry can protect children from adult e-mails.”

“A year or two ago, everyone was putting things like ‘Jay, buy this great sweater,’ in their subject lines,” said Jay Schwedelson, corporate vice president of list firm Worldata. “Then everyone started putting names in their subject lines including spammers and pornographers. Now, so many e-mails are coming with names in their subject lines, that consumers aren’t opening them because they know it’s spam. So in some ways, personalization has become a negative in the subject line.”

The Spam or Ham project, an effort spearheaded by anti-spam technologist John Graham-Cumming to categorize 90 some thousand e-mails into an accurately labeled database of spam and wanted e-mail, has unearthed some dark humor from Enron.

A Utah Republican is trying to get a federal bill passed that would kill efforts by marketers and others to overturn the state

According to Return Path, not only is Google’s contextual ad program not adversely affecting advertisers, Gmail address holders respond better than subscribers to other services.

A volunteer project is underway that has the potential to help spam filters avoid false positives, where anti-spam software mistakenly tags wanted e-mail as spam.

Dubbed “Spam or Ham,” the project asks volunteers to look at as many of a series of random e-mails as they want, and label each as either spam—unsolicited e-mail—or ham—wanted e-mail.

The great national fret over America

A series of five studies by four business school professors from New York University, the University of Chicago and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, asked a bunch of people to e-mail funny and sarcastic phrases to one another and predict whether the messages

Mass marketing may be growing in some quarters, but not among the business-to-business executives surveyed by Epsilon.

An as-yet little-noticed aspect of Google