Email services company Mad Mimi has launched its integration with e-commerce site Etsy, allowing Etsy store owners to automatically sync their shops with the email service in order to drag and drop products directly into email messages. The new integration is part of the suite of services Mad Mimi offers to target small business. The company also integrates with Highrise, Freshbooks, SalesForce and SurveyMonkey.

53.3 million shoppers visited online retailers on Black Friday this year, an increase of 18% over last year according to comScore. ShopperTrak also reported a lift of 3.5% in in-store traffic. The increase may be attributable to search marketing (up 21% according to NetElixir) and email (up 18% as reported by Responsys).

Email volume for the 5-day Thanksgiving weekend from Thanksgiving day through Cyber Monday reached an all-time high this year, up 18% over the same period in 2011 according to data collected and published by Responsys. 93% of retailers sent Cyber Monday email promotions in 2012, up from 88% last year. Responsys expects the high volume to continue, as Cyber Monday promotions are stretching into "Cyber Week."

Experian Marketing Services has analyzed email campaigns that use Twitter-style hashtags in the subject line and found that while the hashtags lift open rates by 4.8%, click and transaction rates decline. The company says that the drop could be due to the action that the subject with a hashtag is asking the subscriber to take, which is not to click but to tweet.  

Unlikely allies Grover Norquist and ACLU chief Laura Murphy have written a joint op-ed on The Hill's Congress Blog, calling for congress to approve the modified Electronic Communications Privact Act legislation submitted by Senator Patrick Leahy. Leahy's bill calls for a police warrant before searching personal emails, giving them similar protection to physical mail. Currently law enforcement officers only need to swear that an email is relevant to an investigation to gain access. The bill goes to the Senate Judiciary Committee for mark up on Thursday of this week. 

Interactive email competitors PowerInbox and ActivePath have decided to merge instead of raising capital separately to compete against each other. Both companies offered email applications that make inbox content interactive, allowing consumers to view videos and comment on Facebook posts right from within the inbox. The combined company will be named PowerInbox and will be based in Cambridge, MA. 

According to the just-released "Email Intelligence Report" by Return Path, 70% of the email messages marked as spam are legitimate marketing emails. Consumers do not differentiate between unsolicited messages and those that they simply do not want to see in their inboxes, a situation that Return Path believes is contritubing to depressed deliverability.

Cloud-Based Email Services company Message Bus has launched Discover, a free reporting service that allows companies to see if their email systems are being abused or misused. Message Bus reports that the service has saved an ecommerce company over $1 million by revealing unauthorized senders.

List management company Worldata reports that the average price of aggregated email lists has dropped 4.35% over the same period a year ago, to $154 per thousand names. Postal list prices have also softened by 3.13% to $124 per thousand. 

Facebook has changed the way pages interact with their fans. The site is now reining in the visibility of each page's post among its audience of fans, and encouraging the use of promoted posts to reach them. This is after its push to marketers to try Facebook ads in order to acquire fans. The result of Facebook's closed messaging system is an audience marketers pay to acquire and then pay to reach. Read more at the Deliverability.com blog.