When Stu Crair owner of The Fort Collins Digital Workshop set out to choose an email newsletter provider, he decided to test drive MailChimp and Constant Contact. After trying out both he determined that MailChimp worked best for his company's email needs, he wrote in a review for The Coloradan. MailChimp's service was free for the volume of email that he sent, whereas Constant Contact charged $30 for the same volume. In addition, Crair liked the fact that MailChimp integrated well with WordPress and he liked the social connectivity and reporting tools.

About a third of repeat customers come back because of an email, according to Forrester Research. Pointing to this statistic at a SES New York this week, Simms Jenkins, CEO of BrightWave Marketing, said that the best way to generate more sales is to talk to customers and prospects. He said that marketing to a database of people who have already opted-in presents a great opportunity. He recommends that brands be proactive about email and make sure that emails are optimized for mobile.

American Airlines is warning consumers about a spam email that is going around that purports to be from the airline. The message contains fake flight confirmations and features the airline's logo at the top of the email. It looks like a receipt for travel between Columbia and Dallas-Fort Worth, as well as between Las Vegas and Dallas-Fort Worth. The airline is warning consumers not to open the email and not to click on any links from the email or reveal any personal information to the sender.

Iran is preparing for its national elections on June 14th and at the same time Google has noticed a spike in email phishing campaigns in the region. "For almost three weeks, we have detected and disrupted multiple email-based phishing campaigns aimed at compromising the accounts owned by tens of thousands of Iranian users," Google's vice president of security engineering Eric Grosse wrote on the Google Online Security blog yesterday. These phishing campaigns are coming from the region and represent a significant jump the volume that the region normally sees.

Ken Solomon, chief executive of the independent Tennis Channel, has apologized for the email blast that he sent to staff members in which he called Comcast a "brutal captor." Solomon composed the email after losing an appeal in a long-running legal dispute with cable giant Comcast Corp. "I regret several ill-chosen, excessively colorful and inappropriate words in a private email to colleagues a few weeks ago reflecting my disappointment with a legal decision," Solomon said in a statement. "The email dealt with an issue that we are obviously passionate about, but the words do not accurately reflect my thoughts about …

Social media is not going to kill email marketing. In fact, email is still the preferred channel to hear from marketers, according to a new study from Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) and Lyris. The report found that 37% of consumers chose prefer email while only 4% of consumers said that online social networks was their preferred mode of engagement with brands.

Revelations that the federal government has the ability to read citizens' emails has made many people uncomfortable. For those that want to ensure privacy in email, there is a free tool called Infoencrypt. The application mixes up your messages and to make them unreadable to anyone except the intended recipient.

In a move to motivate inactive Yahoo email users to login again, Yahoo is giving away the identifications of inactive email addresses beginning next month. Yahoo will free up inactive email addresses for anyone who fails to login before July 15. After that, those addresses will be up for grabs beginning in comers mid-August.

Consumers aren't as convinced about the importance of personalized email marketing messages as marketers are. According to a new report by the Economist Intelligence Unit and email marketing services company Lyris, 63% of consumers said that personalization is so common that they have grown numb to it and 33% said that superficial personalization is one of their top annoyances with marketers. In addition, only 14% of consumers said that they are likely to read personally addressed messages. These responses are a disconnect from marketer responses. Personalization was the second most popular marketing tactic among those executives interviewed in the survey.

Thirty percent of consumers think that loyalty programs collect too much personal information such as an email address, according to Maritz Loyalty Marketing's December 2012 survey, and twenty-four percent of consumers said that they didn't enroll in loyalty programs because of privacy concerns. The survey respondents also said that the No. 1 way that loyalty marketers came across as "creepy," is when they included details of their friends' behavior in messages.