Marketers and consumers agree that email is the channel most in need of investment in 2013, according to a new study by ExactTarget. When asked where marketers should invest more resources this year, email led all responses with 33%. 26% of marketers indicated that email is a channel where they intend to invest more as well, which also led all responses.

While many entrepreneurs are working on apps and filters that marginalize the inbox, others are creating all new ones. Engagio acts as a one-stop inbox for all conversations users have online, organizing replies from Facebook, Twitter, Disqus threads, and many other online discussion platforms. The company got started on $540K in seed capital and is founded by William Mougayar, a former sales and marketing executive at Hewlett-Packard.

Oracle's acquisiton of Eloqua signals that marketing automation, while a hot investment area, is nevertheless a niche solution in the broader fabric of integrated marketing technology. Improving marketing automation and data-driven customer insights remain higher priorities for CMOs. 

According to email security firm Cloudmark, 22% of messages sent through a Yahoo account are spam, compared to 11% from Microsoft and 6% from Google. Cloudmark attributes the difference to a recent history of layoffs and turnover at Yahoo, which makes retaining engineering talent difficult. Global spam volume has declined over the past few years, spiking at 6 trillion messages per month during 2008-2010 before settling to current steady levels of about 1 trillion messages per month. 

Two massive botnets have combined to form what could be one of the biggest spam campaigns ever created. Security software company Symantec discovered the coexistence of two separate botnets on the same computer, which amplifies the spam productivity of every compromised machine. Symantec conservatively estimates that there are 308,000 compromised computers in the botnet, capable of sending 2000 spam messages per hour, or between 1.2 and 3.6 billion spams per day depending on how many hours per day the computers are online.

Bruce Biegel, Managing Director of The Winterberry Group, predicted that the term "Big Data" will soon run its course. Speaking at a Direct Marketing Club of New York event he said, "I think big data’s going to be done by the end of this year. It doesn’t mean as much to us. What we really care about is big marketing data." Biegel believes integrating business data outside of marketing will have to overcome too many organizational obstacles to be realized. "It’s not that the technology is hard. It’s who owns it? Is it the database person? Is it IT? … …

Cloud marketing software company Vocus has announced updates to its marketing platform today. The company acquired email services provider iContact last year and has now fully integrated email into the application along with social, search and publicity.

More online retailers are sending cart abandonment emails, and they are also sending them more quickly. The percentage of the Top 1000 online retailers that send cart abandonment emails grew 30% in 2012. 59% of the Top 500 retailers that send cart abandonment emails do so within 24 hours (up 15%), with 75% of the Second 500 retailers sending within 24 hours (up 6%).

A national task force to address the issue of spam was called for as early as 2005 in Canada, resulting in an anti-spam law that passed in 2010. However the law has still not been enacted, as lobbying groups representing commercial interests have applied pressure on the Canadian Industry Minister. The Minister has reportedly caved to the pressure and introduced a number of new exceptions that limit the effectiveness of the opt-in model, including a third-party provision that allows one business to send emails to another businesses' email lists with only a referral from the business that owns the list, …

Cox Communications has offered a $5 refund to its customers in fifteen states who lost their email service due to a widespread service outage. Thousands of Cox residential email customers were affected from December 14 through December 16 or 17.