Last week I misidentified Azoogle as the list sender of the pseudo JibJab ad, when in fact it was sent by an affiliate that has done work with the Azoogle ad network, but not with this ad. As much as I hate making a mistake, it did give me a chance to talk to Joe Speiser, co-founder of Azoogle and learn more about what they are up to these days.

One of the biggest issues facing legitimate high-volume, e-mail marketers is their inability to monitor their own affiliate network and third party e-mail brokers. I didn't realize this until I found out from my own customers. The product we sell, CETS, was originally designed to provide marketers with competitive intelligence in the e-mail space, but once we started showing it around and selling licenses, almost half the licenses we sold were to e-mail marketers who were using it to monitor their own e-mails, not their competitors.

Those of you who have been reading this e-mail column for a while now might realize that I write two basic types of columns. One is editorial, which this specific article would fall into, where I blather on about some subject or other. The other is more "case study" focused with charts and graphs and data and very little editorializing on my part.

This week I thought it would be interesting to take a look at the last 30 days of e-mail and see who's in the top 10 in various categories. The following data is based on data collected over the last 30 days by CETS, our comprehensive e-mail tracking system.

Remember the old Abbott and Costello routine, Who's On First? The confusion that ensued is similar to the head scratching that can go on by examining the records in today's Whois database, the public record of who owns what domain name.

I've been doing some research into segmentation lately and testing various lists to see if they send out different creative, subject lines and so forth, to different demographic profiles.

Today's column will be a bit of a potpourri as we jump around to a number of different topics I've found interesting over the past week or so.

Back when I first started writing this column I reported on the strange doings at the Wesley Clark campaign when it came to how the general was marketing himself on the Internet as part of his bid to grab the Democratic presidential nomination.

It is time for a little spring house cleaning: today's article will be little bits and pieces that have been hanging around the Email Insider corporate headquarters, with no particular thread tying them together:

According to the latest quarterly report from Doubleclick, click-through numbers for email campaigns are slightly down. A big part of declining click-through numbers might not have anything to do with lack of interest in the offers people are receiving, but of the atrocious quality-control practices and poor re-direct procedures used by many email campaigns. And there is absolutely no reason for it.