Thirty-three percent of brands require just an email address to opt-in to their email lists this year, which is up from 20 percent back in 2008, according to a new report by email services company Return Path. The Email Subscriber Experience 2008-2013 report looked at the email practices of 61 companies from five years ago and compared these practices with what businesses are doing today. The report found that 25% of brands offer an opt-down alternative today. Back in 2008, only 3% of senders did so. The report also revealed that today 80% of brands send welcome emails, up from …

Gmail users experienced some delivery delays late yesterday and the company has apologized for the issue. The company admitted on Monday evening that "less than 50 percent" of Gmail's user base experienced slow email delivery and issues with attachments. Today the company said that 71 percent of email messages were not affected. Emails that did experience issues had an average delivery delay of 2.6 seconds. The company also admitted that about 1.5 percent of messages look two or more hours to deliver.

Thirty-two percent of consumers think that email marketers have gotten better at sending relevant communications over the past five years, services, according to a new report from email services company Kentico. The report also revealed that 31 percent of those surveyed believe email marketing has gotten worse, while 36 percent say it has remained about the same. According to the report, 37 percent of respondents said that they willfully subscribe to 1-5 email lists. Thirty-one percent will subscribe to 6-10 lists, and 14 percent subscribe to 11-15 lists. Seven percent subscribe to 16-20 lists, and 5 percent subscribe to more …

Vertical Response, Constant Contact and MailChimp were the Top 3 vendors in the 2013 Sellers Choice Awards. Vertical Response came in first place with an overall score of 8.4. Constant Contact came in second place with an overall score of 7.4. MailChimp came in third place with an overall score of 7.0.

The U.S. Postal Service is applying to trademark a software that will allow it to sell email encryption services. On September 6th, the agency filed for the brand "United States Postal Service Digital Services," which includes selling, "tamper-detection capabilities" for protecting electronic documents. According to the filing, the software would work by verifying the identities of people transmitting information and making sure that the intended recipients are the only ones to receive the information.

LinkedIn has denied accusations that the company breaks into the email accounts of its users to harvest their contacts' addresses. Four users filed a class action suit against the company last week, charging that the social networking site hacked into their external email accounts without permission and then used these addresses to promote the site's services. In a blog post, LinkedIn denied the charges claiming that it does not hack into members' accounts and claims that any access it uses is with user permission.

Daily-deal company LivingSocial is refocusing its business model from selling time-sensitive offers to being an company that gives retailers e-commerce tools. At the same time, the company has introduced a new set of tools to help merchants analyze their sales and campaigns. While LivingSocial will continue to send emails to subscribers, the company has been revamping its search box on its site and app in a move to help consumers connect with offers through site and mobile search.

Digital marketing services firm ExactTarget, a salesforce.com company, released a new user interface for its email marketing products this week. One cool feature is the ability to measure Gmail Tabs engagement data. The redesign also allows marketers to manage data in real time with drag-and-drop segmentation, ad hoc customer reporting, and campaign performance benchmarking from Return Path.

Email marketers with Hotmail and Outlook.com subscribers on their list, listen up. Microsoft has reorganized the way it is delivering email to these email addresses and many email messages are ending up in the spam folder. The new system is delivering Microsoft Outlook owns 17% of the email market, so marketers that would like to reach these subscribers should consider getting on Microsoft's whitelist.

Cisco managers meant to send an email among management about an online training program. But someone accidentally cced thousands of other employees around the globe and sent the message to thousands of other Cisco employees. In the end, the reply chain included four million emails sent, using up more than 375GB of network traffic until Cisco's IT cut it off. An insider estimated the time-wasting incurred to cost the company about $600,000.