Dear Email Diva: In Hotmail, Yahoo, MSN and AOL the emails we are sending out are being delivered to the users' inboxes, but all content and images have been deleted. There is absolutely nothing to see -- no links, nothing! Can you shed some insight on this?

With Kmart reincarnating the Blue Light Special as a helpful spokesperson/"retail superhero" named Mr. Bluelight, I thought it was an auspicious time to talk about deal-a-day emails. Just like the Blue Light Special, these promotional emails promise a good deal for a limited time.

With all the news over the last few weeks of the cyber acquisitions -- Hitwise, Third Screen Media, DoubleClick, aQuantive -- it's easy to get lulled into the feeling that the whole world has gone interactive. Not so. This week I'm up at the ACCM (Annual Conference for Catalog & Multichannel Merchants), and in many ways it is like traveling back in time. This is a place where call centers rule and publications are printed the way God intended: on paper.

Two smart people had helpful comments about "lost" subscribers in response to a recent article, "You're (Probably) Not Mailing All Your Subscribers."

How many email marketers participate in this share of voice discussion? Your programs potentially touch millions of your customers and prospects. The cadence in which you do this can stagger many marketing executives, and your ability to track response at an individual, segment, cell, DMA or product level should make common advertising measurement discussion a real eye-opener.

"Content is no longer king," Craig Spiezle, director of online safety strategies and technologies at Microsoft, told Email Insider Summit attendees last week. "If you don't have email authentication, your emails are going to be throttled." Unfortunately, email authentication and deliverability are growing issues that were much talked about at the Summit -- unfortunate because these kinds of issues push email back down into the IT realm instead of elevating it to a more strategic stature that's at home in C-suite discussions.

I'm back from another Email Insider Summit. I think, without a doubt, this was the most successful Summit to date. Nearly 90% of the audience was first-time attendees, which I think bodes well for the future of the conference. I heard repeatedly how much everyone learned -- and that attendees left the conference standing a little taller and feeling a renewed sense of pride about what they do.

The Email Diva has been pondering social networks, and came to this obvious yet surprising conclusion: Among adult women, pass-along email is the primary social networking medium. This phenomenon presents an opportunity for both charitable and commercial enterprises.

How do you explain to your mother what you do for a living? It starts with telling her people will spend $15.73 billion showering their mothers with gifts this year, according to a survey by the National Retail Federation. The study notes that people are more thoughtful about the way they give gifts -- but are marketers as creative in their tactics and messages surrounding this very popular consumer event?

I've been reading Chris Baggott's newly released book Email Marketing By the Numbers: How to Use the World's Greatest Marketing Tool to Take Any Organization to the Next Level, and one of the things that got me thinking was the advice "Be human." Chris says, "People don't fall in love with institutions... Your chance of landing in a great relationship increases exponentially when you show a human side."