Email services provider Silverpop has announced the addition of 110 new clients in Q3 2012, a 39% increase over the previous year. The company also reports increased customer usage of several of its application features, including landing pages, web tracking and lead scoring.

Over the weekend, social media management company Hootsuite sent many of its free trial users an upsell offer to the paid premium service, but botched the send so that hundreds of addresses showed up visibly in the "To" field. In an email to the affected customers, Hootsuite explained that the error was due to its integration with one-time competitor Seesmic, which the company purchased in September. The affected customers (many of whom hoisted pitchforks on Twitter) were offered an apology and a product credit.

Russian email-to-social networking group Mail.Ru has sold off parts of its stakes in Facebook, Groupon and Zynga, raising $200 - $250 million from the sales. A spokesperson for the group commented, "We've always been very clear that Groupon, Zynga and Facebook, positioned inside of Mail, are financial assets, not strategic ones."

New data from Responsys reveals that promotional emails during October 2012 were up 22% of October 2011. However the number of messages referencing Breast Cancer Awareness Month dropped 33%, which Responsys attributes to the political scandal earlier in the year. 

Blue State Digital, a division of WPP Digital, powered the email, social and mobile messaging that contributed to 20 campaign wins in the just-completed election cycle, from the presidency to senate races to key ballot initiatives. Developed for the campaigning business during Howard Dean's historically digital 2004 run, the BSD technology platform is capable of sending 100 million messages per day and processes more online contributions than any other service. 

Epsilon, the marketing services division of Alliance Data Systems, has announced its acquisiton of Hyper Marketing Inc to add to its suite of direct-to-customer connections. Epsilon sends over 42 billion emails annually on behalf of clients such as Ford Motor Company, Best Buy, Walgreens and P&G. 

The NetProspex Data Enrichment Connector app now connects to Eloqua's marketing automation platform, allowing marketers to append data from NetProspex's database to their existing customer and prospect records. The contacts in the NetProspex database are crowd-sourced, provided by NetProspex customers in exchange for access to other contacts in a co-operative database model. 

Watchguard Technologies XCS (extensible content security) has been awarded the Frost & Sullivan 2012 North American Product Quality Leadership Award in Email Content Security, the company announced today. WatchGuard XCS is designed to protect enterprise networks from security threats including spam, malware, viruses and network attacks. 

Sendmail announced today the Sentrion Rogue Email Application Control (REAC) appliance designed to address the growing security, compliance and cloud migration threats posed by email-generating systems and applications in large and regulated organizations. With more than half of all messages from within an enterprise originating from a machine instead of a person, there is a growing danger of rogue and unmanaged email causing security risks, errant email storms and traffic spikes.

The Obama campaign relied heavily on email to motivate supporters, most notably to make contributions. At the heart of the campaign's operation was a team of analysts, researchers, technologists and marketers who worked in a windowless room called "the Cave" in the campaign's Chicago headquarters. If the 2008 campaign's advantage was its network of databases of donors and supporters, the secret weapon in 2012 was even richer data aggregated into a single database, out of which the team in the Cave created targeted programs like the Quick Donate program which allowed 1-click repeat donations, and tested senders and subject lines …