We've been monitoring the number of active legitimate email marketing lists, and have been noticing some interesting trends. In general, we see a steady build-up of the number of lists sending emails from October through the Christmas holidays, followed by a steep decline. Last year the decline remained relatively steady from January to October, but this year we are noticing an almost immediate recovery.

Dear Email Diva: I would like to test sending Multipart MIME messages, but do not know how to implement. Is there any way you can provide detailed instructions on how to build and send these messages?

You create a great email program, you optimize creative, timing and targeting; the recipient finds it interesting and clicks through to the Web site. Touchdown! Or is it? Just how well is the user paid off for his effort once he reaches the Web site? Landing pages and direct response Web experiences can make or break the email marketer. Most companies develop site experiences based on marketing intuition instead of empiric data regarding the way a page, a group of pages or tasks are performed on a site.

FOR ONLINE RETAILERS with limited store presence, word of mouth can be invaluable. While send-to-a-friend (STAF) programs can be useful to just about any retailer for generating viral buzz, refer-a-friend (RAF) programs appear to have their niche with some of these store-poor retailers, particularly those with higher-end products. Unlike STAF, which forwards a newsletter along to a friend, RAF programs send an email that introduces the friend to the retailer.

This column will provide some follow-up and updates for items mentioned in past columns. An e-mail scam artist finally gets caught; another scam becomes immortalized on "Saturday Night Live"; companies claim "we don't do e-mail," despite much evidence to the contrary.

The E-mail Diva discusses the fine points of delivering press releases electronically. For instance: Is a press release ever considered spam?

I'm as guilty as every other strategist or consultant in our space who makes "best practices" presentations to clients, spouting every statistic in the book to describe the consumer/marketer landscape and what works. But when push comes to shove, and I have to show five "best practices" examples of relevancy in e-mail programs, triggered e-mail programs, surveys, opt-in registration pages, or media creative... I grit my teeth and smile and present work from the industry to show what others are doing. Does that make it "best practices," though? I've seen three presentations from e-mail vendors in the last month about …

Last week we took a graphical look at how 3 key insights of email rendering have become all of the rage. However, the column assumed that readers understood how and why image rendering has become such a big issue and what options there are for help and advice on image blocking and testing and what we can expect in the future.

An interesting article fell on my desk this morning: a piece in the current Time magazine called "A Spammer's Revenge, with a subhead that reads, "His right to free speech trumps your right to privacy." The article describes the background of a $3.8 million lawsuit that a company called Omega World Travel brought against Mark Mumma, an "Internet services provider and antispam crusader."

Dear E-Mail Diva: My nonprofit has used e-mail blasts to alert our field about upcoming events and issues. Our e-mail service vendor now tells us most of our messages are getting caught in spam filters. Are e-blasts no longer an effective vehicles?