ToutApp, an email communications platform, aims to simplify business users' inboxes with templated forms for repetitive tasks such as meeting requests, introductions and invoices, and also provide insight into responses with analytics features and a real-time feed. The analytics allow users to see who has opened or interacted with messages sent. 

The DMA announced today the appointment of Linda Woolley as President and CEO. Wooley was formerly the EVP of Washington Operations and headed up the association's initiatives in protecting the rights of marketers to collect and use data. The DMA's new agenda under Woolley is to support and advance data-driven marketing practices. 

New research on consumer ecommerce spending by MailChimp has found that Hotmail users have the highest spending, followed closely by AOL. Gmail, Yahoo and Comcast users spend less. Researchers hypothesize that spending by Hotmail and AOL users is higher because address owners in services skew a little older (or rather, skew less towards teenagers) and may have more disposable income. 

Forrester Research predicts that "Digital Marketing" will lose its prefix and become just "Marketing" in 2013, as all marketers' output will become inherently digital. In its "Trends for the B2C CMO to Watch in 2013" report, the research firm also forecasts that digital budgets will become 20% of the total. 

Hotmail users began reporting problems logging into their mobile accounts and being locked out of the service entirely beginning on Monday January 7th and continuing into today. Microsoft acknowledged the problem on Monday and wrote on its Hotmail page late Tuesday, "Hotmail is working for all web users and POP-based accounts. Some mobile device users relying on EAS (Active Sync) may see problems accessing their email, calendar and contacts. We are working to restore their access." It is unclear how many users are affected.

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff remarked in his keynote address at CES today entitled "Marketing in The Cloud" made the connection between customer service and marketing messaging by saying, "You don’t want me on Twitter [saying] that Samsung, it didn’t work. You want problems to be easily solved for you. Then someone gets on Twitter, and you’re going to say, I love Samsung, I love Toyota. That’s marketing … that is the new marketing." He continued, "“How are you connected with your customer, your partners, your employees. Email? Those days are over.”

Researchers in the malware unit of the Georgia Tech Research Institute are aiming to reduce the likelihood for success of corporate phishing attacks by focusing on the weakest link in the chain - the single user who makes a mistake and allows a security breach to the network. To do this, they are taking advantage of publicly available information such as SEC filings and other data used by hackers themselves, in an effort to better warn and prepare end users for attacks. 

Econsultancy and Adestra announce the launch of the 7th Annual Adestra/Econsultancy Email Marketing Industry Census, aimed at measuring the habits, processes and objectives of email marketers. Participants will receive an advance copy of the in-depth report. Last year's survey collected responses from over 800 marketers.

Email marketers know that smaller list segments and decreased frequency often lead to higher engagement, but during this year's holiday season many ignored that advice - and saw metrics rise as a result. Best Buy, for example, trimmed its list from 32.6 to 32.3 million, but tripled the number of messages it sent. Inbox placement rose slightly to 97% and open rate nosed upwards as well, from 9.4% to 9.6%. 

Nielsen's latest report on Share of Mobile Time by Activity finds that texting (14.1%) and social networks (10.2%) capture the greatest share. Mobile users spend 5.3% of their time in email, ahead of web surfing (3.3%), mapping (2.8%) and the camera (0.9%). By contrast, consumers spend 7.1% of their computer time on email.