Dear Email Diva: Please illuminate us on the value of the email "From" address. It may seem a simple question, but the lead management system my clients use has a "From" address that looks like this: 765432@lms.humptydumpty.com . There is no reference to my clients' name or even their brand. The Lead Management System vendor has not been able to offer a solution. Thoughts?

To add to last week's article on email acquisition, I interviewed various experts in the field of email acquisition, lead generation and affiliate marketing.

When people say "go figure," they're probably not imploring you to do a mathematical calculation. More likely, the phrase is being used in the colloquial sense of "what's the meaning of this?" and would be followed by ample head scratching. Regardless, you'll want to apply both meanings after reading the white paper "The State of Email Metrics & Bounce Management. "The survey results make it unequivocally clear that demystifying our metrics is a critical step to moving our industry forward," notes Deirdre Baird, CEO of Pivotal Veracity.

Okay, you've spent a lot of money with firms and consultants to get your message delivered to the inbox. But what does it look like when it finally gets there? The answer could be a shock to your creative team. There is a trend within many Web-based email services to block images by default.

Dear Email Diva: I am a designer, marketer and reseller of emarketing services. I have compiled great lists and love the user-friendly aspects of my Email Service Provider (ESP), but feel using their servers "cheapens" me to my clients. Is there a way or software that provides templates and dashboard reports and lets me send email out myself?

Email acquisition is called many things in today's world. Terms you may have heard include behavioral targeted email, performance email, and lead generation. Whatever you call it, the nature of the effort is to develop a relationship with a customer or prospect by engaging them primarily through a focused email from a list partner or other source outside of your company's control. There are many ways of going about it -- you can rent a list, buy space in a sponsored third-party newsletter, or buy text or ad space in a sponsored email -- but something is obviously working, because …

Last week, we wrote about winning back the list subscriber using email. Email acquisition tactics are definitely a hot topic! And, as fellow Email Insider Melinda Krueger points out, "you can't buy permission to send email to an acquired address." You also can't buy that person's love of your product or service. So what's a marketer to do? At the risk of unleashing YAA (yet another acronym), I think it's time to start talking about CPB: cost-per-buzz.