Los Angeles startup Contur has launched an email management tool aimed at users who receive at least 100 emails per day and would benefit from greater organization and task management within the inbox. The application integrates with Gmail and is available currently through private beta. 

Return Path today launched several new products as part of its Email Intelligence Suite for Marketers, designed to help marketers solve measurement and analytics challenges. One of these - Inbox Insight - offers visibility into competitors' campaign performance through real subscriber activity, including percentage of emails read, forwarded, deleted after reading, deleted without reading, subscriber engagement levels, ISP-marked spam, user-marked spam and other metrics.

Segmention is an ideal option if you have all the RFM data at your fingertips. But if you don't, there are still ways to parse your list in order to send more relevant messages, using geography, gender, engagement rates and click data. 

As of the first week in September, fifteen perent of top online retailers had already begun ringing in the holidays in the inbox, according to Responsys. The Inbox Group reports similar findings, that retailers beginning to promote Christmas in October last year have already begun in September this year. Intense competition for inbox attention and limited holiday dollars is the cause of this year's "Christmas Creep." 

MailChimp analyzed the subject lines of 12 billion (not a typo) messages to get to the bottom of the subject line length debate. The data indicates that as subject line length increases, nothing happens to open rate performance. 

A new survey of email marketers has found that 16% do not measure deliverability, and one in four do not know how to optimize their email program. Over the next twelve months, the top priorities for optimizing email include a greater reliance on analytics (37%) and social media integration (37%).

Blue Kangaroo, a new service by startup ChoozOn, aims to clean up inboxes and increase the visibility of daily deal offers by removing the many tempting sale messages into their own space, out of the personal inbox. The service provides consumers with an easy way to scan offers from different deal sites, and also prioritizes the most relevant based on consumer interests. 

The rise in popularity of content marketing means that many organizations are now at the risk of content chaos. An editorial calendar for email closes content gaps in your email program, produces new targeting opportunities, aligns your email content with your other channels, and uncovers new ways to repurpose existing content.

Because email is the primary channel of communication for two-thirds of businesses, Small to Medium Enterprises (SMEs) working as part of a supply chain for larger enterprises must be particularly diligent about email security. 

FanMail, a specialist in email marketing for the entertainment industry, launches next month FanMail.fm, a new platform that allows its clients of musicians and other performers to post create targeted email messages using content previously posted on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other social channels. FanMail's email backend is powered by ExactTarget.