A new poll by eCircle finds that more CMOs believe email to be "very important" for holiday sales than any other digital channel. 40 percent of the respondents believed that email marketing can generate up to 10 percent in sales increase over the holiday period. 

A smart inbox set up to only display messages that reside in the main inbox and that are also unread behaves in a sort of Schrödinger state. The messages cease to exist in the smart inbox if they are read and not acted on, compelling inbox owners to deal with them immediately instead of letting them pile up. Erwin Schrödinger was an Austrian physicist best remembered for his work in quantum physics, and his thought experiment entitled Schrödinger's Cat, which was about how an object may exist in two states simultaneously. 

Email marketing has necessarily become more sophisticated as volume increases along with the availability of tools to sift and sort messages. 

OutboundEngine has launched a marketing platform aimed at professionals in the real estate, insurance, taxation and mortgage verticals. The OutboundEngine Platform combines email and social media paired with lead scoring and analytics, as well as pre-written content within its target verticals to allow its clients to turn their email lists into fully automated email programs. 

Online marketing services firm HubShout has announced a new turnkey email newsletter service for clients, offering custom newsletters composed of curated industry news and professionally written copy. The service is aimed as SMBs that are aggregating an audience of subscribers but do not have the resources to execute an email strategy. Messages are sent through Amazon's SES cloud infrastructure.

Spamhaus has begun blacklisting major retailers for typos in email addresses. The incorrect addresses are thought to be the result of the retailers' e-receipt programs that allow a customer to enter an email address at the point of sale in order to have a receipt emailed after the purchase instead of printed out. Spamhaus blacklisting can suppress email delivery by as much as 60%. 

The Veterans Administration announced previously its plans to move 400K employees to cloud-based email, calendars and messaging on Microsoft Office 365 by 2014. The migration will begin with a first phase of 15,000 users within a separate community cloud in order to determine the most prudent approach for migrating the rest of the massive user base. The VA estimates that it will save $85 million with the full migration, much of which is by avoiding expensive internal hardware upgrades.

Online retail visits for the week of December 9-15 are up 8% over the same period last year, according to the latest data from Experian Marketing Services. Amazon remains the leading site with over 166 million visits. 

Christopher Chaney, an accomplished email hacker who illegally obtained access to over 50 high profile accounts between November 2010 and October 2011, has been sentenced to ten years in prison after pleading guilty to wiretapping and other charges. Among the accounts he hacked were those of Christina Aguliera, Scarlett Johansson and Mila Kunis.

Daily deal retailer Rue La La has halted its daily sales for a day, replacing its usual email to customers with an appeal to honor the Sandy Hook Elementary School victims. The email creative simply lists all of the victims by first name only and exchanges the usual call-to-action with a plea to donate to the United Way of Western Connecticut.