Email and marketing automation company Act-On Software reports that it has tripled revenues and double headcount in 2012. The company has also upgraded its platform capacity to 10 billion emails per year.

A new study by Emailvision Holdings finds that 28% of consumers would share their names with brands in exchange for "better targeted offers." Not surprisingly a higher percentage - 37% - would provide their gender for improved targeting, as gender is a better criteria for identifying product matches than a name. 8% of the respondents in the study would share their underwear size if it resulted in improved targeting.

A year ago a group of 15 ESPs, financial firms and message security companies founded DMARC.org, a working group to create standards to help prevent phishing and other email security threats. While the group announced in late in 2012 that a number of additional companies have adopted the DMARC standards - including Constant Contact and Outlook.com - adoption nevertheless remains slow. DMARC allows senders and recipients to exchange authentication information when transmitting messages in order to guarantee to the address owner that the message is safe. For example, messages sent to Outlook.com with the DMARC standard are now flagged in …

79% of smartphone owners use their devices to read email while 78% use them to make phone calls, according to the Econsultancy 2013 Digital Publishing Report. Email is also the leading application of tablet owners (79%), ahead of playing games (67%) and Facebook (61%).

Inbox Marketer reports that email open and click rates in Canada rose in 2012, while the same engagement metrics dropped in the U.S. The data is part of the company's annual Email Marketing Trends report. The report also finds that 46% of emails in Canada are opened on mobile devices. 

Outlook.com users have been reporting missing email messages since October following their joining the service. After responding to user complaints on the company's forum by deleting them, Microsoft today finally acknowledged the problem and explained that it was associated with renaming accounts. Microsoft reports that it has fixed many of the user accounts that were having issues and will continue to work on the rest.

The Direct Marketing Association and Neolane fielded a survey of mid-level and executive-level marketers and found that 40% report that their companies have a big data strategy. 37% do not have a strategy in place and 23% are not sure. 57% of respondents believe the biggest benefit of big data is to drive greater campaign conversions. 34% believe customer insight to be big data's greatest upside.

Online video hosting company Wistia increased its conversions to paying customers from free trial by 30% using marketing automation to send drip campaigns to prospects. The campaigns featured blog content and personalized emails and were powered by Pardot, a recent acquisition of ExactTarget.

A rash of recent malware exploits have caused significant damage and expense, including shutting down power plants for three weeks, an $850 million robbery, and the theft of terabytes of information from government embassies. Infestations result from malware finding its way onto an unsuspecting host computer via email attachments and links, as well as USB sticks.

22% of marketers surveyed for a study by Experian Marketing Services report using pop-ups on their websites to collect email addresses. 56% collect email addresses right on the home page of the website. The survey also found that over half of marketers report that they collect less than 25% of their email addresses from their website.