I'm writing from the floor of probably the most crowded Ad:Tech since 1999. The place is packed with two floors of exhibitors. No surprise--there are now more search companies out there than results to a Google search on "Pamela Anderson." It is anyone's guess how many of the hordes of search companies will be here for next year's Ad:Tech, but one supposes far less than are currently clogging the aisles.

E-mail is for readers. That's why I'm always amazed that developing great copy receives so little attention and so little budget.

These e-mail addresses are wrong: Dogman@hotmial.com. asdf@asdf.com. Do you see the mistakes? With more users entering incorrect e-mail addresses, we have to work harder to clean up our databases.

There are a lot of conspiracy theorists who are convinced the world is run by secret organizations like The Trilateral Commission, Yale's Skull and Bones Society, even the local co-op board. The online equivalent of these invisible confabs is the private, invitation-only, e-mail list. I know because, I must confess, I've founded two of them.

"Nobody reads that stuff. We need to cut out some of this copy." Your client or manager says this and heads nod around the table. Of course. Self evident. But not always true.

Do you write creative briefs for your e-mail campaigns? Your initial response may be, "Oh, no, creative briefs are painful and create more work." After all, do we really care about the target audience, performance metrics or attitudes? At the end of the day, I think we do.

A/B testing, where the performance of one piece of creative is compared to another, can be costly. So I thought it would be beneficial to help some of you small guys out there with some "free" advice. And "free" is exactly what we'll be looking at.

What content should you include in your e-mails? There are ways to focus your efforts that yield a big difference in terms of customer satisfaction. The first and most difficult step is to make sure your company's stakeholders "get it." They need to understand that e-mail content cannot be focused solely on the message the company wants to send; it must be blended with content the recipient wants to read.

The annual Direct Marketing Association (DMA) conference is always an interesting event for me to attend because, as someone who comes from a direct marketing background, I like to see how this offline arena is working with and being affected by my current field of e-mail marketing.

Over the years, I've written some controversial columns that got me into hot water more times than I can count. Usually it is some company screaming about something, or a wannabe pundit who lets me know in no uncertain terms what a moron I am. I have one dedicated reader who sends me e-mails pointing out all the spelling mistakes and typos in my article. But without a doubt, the most reaction I've had was from a column I wrote here a number of months ago on Nigerian e-mail scams.