Instead of building a proprietary infrastructure for sending high volumes of email, HonestMail.net is the first ESP to use the Simple Email Services for bulk email launched by Amazon Web Services a year ago. The company claims to offer prices at 50% less than its competitors, the result of its outsourced infrastructure and lean marketing and operations. 

Return Path has analyzed a number of email campaigns that employ symbols in the subject lines, an increasingly popular practice. In most cases, the messages using a symbol saw significantly reduced ISP and user-marked spam rates, dropping by three-fourths in one example. Messages using subject line symbols also saw higher read rates, lower percentages of being deleted unread or after reading, and an increase in recipient forwarding. 

Crain's New York has ranked email intelligence company Return Path as the 12th best place to work in New York City. The ranking is based on confidential feedback submitted by employees and scored by Crain's for engagement, mission and identity.

This week marks the 20th anniversary of the first text message, making it ten years younger than email, yet - according to a study by Experian Marketing Services - twice as popular on mobile phones. The company has found that while the percentage of mobile users who engage in texting and email on their mobile phones varies by age group, the percentage who text is roughly twice as large as the mobile email users, regardless of age group.

A new survey of B-to-B marketers conducted by Software Advice has found that rented or purchased email lists are a better source of leads than social media, direct mail and telemarketing, scoring higher than these other channels both in quantity and quality of leads produced. Only traditional advertising and display/CPM advertising are reported to produce more leads, though the quality of leads in these channels is not regarded as high as those coming from email. 

Trustifi is to be issued a patent for its service that digitally signs email with an electronic time stamp, the company reported today. Trustifi Postmarked Email provides proof that a message with specified content and attachments was sent, and also indicates the sending time, date and intended recipient address. The service is aimed at the healthcare, government, enterprise and financial services markets. 

Top online retailers sent their subscribers an average ov 6.4 emails each during the week ending November 30, 2012, according to the Responsys Retail Email Index. The volume sets an all-time record and is a 9% increase over the previous week and a 15% increase year-over-year. 

Cloud-based email services provider Mailjet has raised $3.3 million from Alven Capital and private investors, after surviving on only $300,000 in investments since its launch in late 2010. Mailjet leads with a simple, intuitive interface aimed at attracting smaller businesses and has grown from 3,000 to 10,000 clients in the past year. 

Indiemark announced today the launch of BlackBox, a service to help identify bad data within email lists. The service is available directly to marketers to evaluate purchased lists and their purveyors, as well as to ESPs that wish to analyze lists for bad data on behalf of their clients before mailings.

The amendment to the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act, which passed yesterday through the Senate Judiciary Committee, may impact more than email privacy. The amendment is attached to an update to the 1988 Video Privacy Protection Act that makes it easier for consumers to share information on Facebook about watched videos through services like Netflix.