A few years ago, rich media email was all the rage. Companies like Dynamics Direct, TMX Interactive, Audiobase, Mind Arrow, and Radical Mail were all touting their wares at big ticket conferences and opening branch offices around the country like a Seattle coffee franchise. I, myself, used to put on whole road shows dedicated to rich media email. But while rich media on web sites, banners, and floating ads grew in prominence over the last few years, rich media email seems to have just about faded from view. What happened?

This may not be my greatest column--and it's all your fault. I had so many requests for the Market Sector report last week (and the requests are still coming in) that I decided to post the whole thing to my Web site. Of course, I had to figure out how to create percentages in Crystal Decisions, and then I thought it would be cool to add some graphs, and of course I spent a ton of time getting the formatting correct. But naturally, it meant that the time I was supposed to be working on this column got frittered away …

This week I have another free email report for all of you. You'll have to read the article or at least scroll to the bottom to see what it is, but first:

One of the more interesting things I've been exploring this week is email subject lines. Direct marketers that use an affiliate network usually have a strict set of subject lines that their affiliates are allowed to use, although policing those affiliates can be a challenge.

I've never seen "A Beautiful Mind," but I've been told that there are scenes where Russell Crowe's character begins to see patterns in endless reams of meaningless data. The patterns in streams of random numbers begin to pop out at him. I'm beginning to feel that way about email.

One of the most amazing things to me is the number of unnecessary hurdles that many companies thrust in front of their customers who are simply trying to sign up for their newsletters. Sometimes the simplest newsletter has more security surrounding it than some of my investment banking accounts.

A colleague of mine walked into the office the other day and told me he had just bought an X10 camera system. I don't think I have to explain to this audience what X10 cameras are and the effect that their "pioneering" work in pop-ups have had on the whole of interactive marketing. Now, my colleague is a very savvy interactive marketer himself so this news made me pause. This is what he told me: "I don't remember if I went to their Website, or saw an ad, but I just decided one day that I wanted to have one."

How things have changed. When I first started evangelizing rich media (over seven years ago now!), it was really the poor cousin of online advertising. Back then, and well towards the end of the '90s, rich media represented only the tiniest fraction of the online advertising market, according to IAB stats at the time. There was little usage, little coverage, little interest, and very little understanding of this strange area of online marketing that consisted of talking banners and interactive ads.

One of the things I've learned since we began tracking email is that advertisers that make heavy use of affiliate networks and list brokers to deliver their messages do not have a solid method of monitoring those affiliates and third party lists. They are often in the dark on whether the proper creative was used, if the affiliate is CAN-SPAM compliant, or even which lists they are on.

One of the provisions of the CAN-SPAM Act is the requirement that all marketing emails include an actual working postal address somewhere in the email body so that recipients can write to have their names removed from the marketer's email lists. To a certain degree, this provision is a bit quaint - a remnant from a by gone era. Who in the age of the Internet is going to write a letter to an email marketer instead of clicking on the unsubscribe link?