In preparation for the Email Insider Summit happening this week, we sent out a survey to the attendees asking about various issues facing them. While I will be presenting the details at the Summit itself, I thought I would provide some of the more interesting results here.

A charitable organization wants to understand how to work with social networks to increase its donor base. My research has led me to wonder what impact these networks will have on reaching Gen Y/Net Gen, and how networks will affect the future of email. The first step, though, is to get that we don't get it.

Recently I heard that email as an industry is worth $10 billion. Not bad after only 10 years or so, if you buy into that number. As our industry approaches maturity, I believe we are on the verge of a new phase of evolution. Now is the time to get ready for it.

Students of language know that as new terms become accepted by the mainstream they evolve into shorter words, single words and shed their capitalization and hyphenation. Words like "on-line" and "Web log" have over time become "online" and "blog" as people became more comfortable with them. "Electronic mail" has followed a similar acceptance arc, becoming "E-mail" and then "e-mail." It's now time for the word to take its final step and become simply "email," severing its antiquated 19th-century association with mail delivered by people in blue uniforms.

It is hard to believe that we are only one week away from the next Email Insider Summit. For those companies and individuals who cannot be at the summit, you can still have a presence if you've written a white paper, case study, or best practices paper. The Email Experience Council will be hosting a White Paper Room at the summit and is accepting white papers on topics that extend the discussion on email marketing.

I have just experienced, for the fifth time, a silent-but-deadly problem with email delivery systems. Have you found there are companies from whom you cannot get email? No matter how many times you go to their site and sign up, the email never gets to your inbox or even your junk mail filter....

I thought this update from Pivotal Veracity from the Authentication and Online Trust Summit (AOTS) was quite valuable to share with the MediaPost audience. As background, Microsoft started AOTS in 2004 to foster adoption of Sender ID and promote email authentication through the industry....

In last week's column I talked about all the uses retailers have found for videos in their emails -- everything from commercials and product demonstrations to trade show and fashion show coverage. This week I'm going to talk about how retailers integrate video links into their email messages.

When I started writing this column in 2003 (hard to believe), I was one of only a few people writing about email. Today it seems there more people writing about email than are on a Russian spammers's mailing list. And it is about to get even worse -- or better, depending on your point of view.

One of the Email Diva's pet peeves is the use of superfluous exclamation points. If your copy doesn't express enthusiasm and energy on its own, punctuation will not help you. Rather, it does the opposite and makes you look like a huckster. But this idea, courtesy of Geene Rees at Acxiom Digital, is so good that it deserves an exclamation point -- maybe two!!