Most online retailers reported a strong holiday season, with year-over-year increases in revenue and traffic. American Apparel was among them, expecting four times the Cyber Monday traffic compared to 2011. Instead the brand saw traffic balloon to a 20-times increase instead, which its head of e-commerce attributes to email. American Apparel doubled its email list from the preceding year and used it to aggressively promote a 20% off site-wide sale and a free shipping promotion.

A security patch released by Yahoo earlier this week to address a vulnerability exposed last week is ineffective, according to researchers at Offensive Security. The researchers used a video to demonstrate that the patch provided by Yahoo does little to defend against an attack. The vulnerability was made public last week when a hacker posted a video on YouTube demonstrating how to breach the system's security with a malicious link in a spam message. 

Email marketing and delivery provider SMTP has announced its acquisition of email design testing and analytics company PreviewMyEmail.com. PME allows users to see how messages render across a range of clients and platforms prior to sending.

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.