I can always tell when autumn is approaching: my favorite magazines publish huge telephone-book-sized bibles on the dictates of fashion. While perusing this year's stack, I see an endless parade of "What's HOT / What's NOT" for the upcoming season. Seems this is the time of year to clear out the old and make way for the approaching changes. Now is also the perfect time for email marketers to a closer look at what we've been doing and weed out outdated thinking. Why not take advantage of the emerging trends this fall, and set your path for a hugely successful …

With the holiday email season already underway, I thought I'd put on my consumer hat and share my list of the most frustrating, consumer-unfriendly aspects of retailers' email programs, in the hope that some will fix them before the season heats up further:

lately, despite the miles of verbiage that I and all my fellow pundits churn out each week on email marketing, I wonder how much we really know about our industry. This was brought home to me recently when I asked my Linked-In network and the Inbox Insiders list to define how big the market is for email marketing. The answers were enlightening. Without revealing the actual number -- which I'll try and provide next week -- the difference between the highest and lowest estimate for the size of the market, both of which came from respectable trade organizations, was off …

Dear Email Diva: What's the current feeling on email page widths and lengths? I know there's been a lot of discussion lately about above and below the fold and sizing for preview pane, but I'm wondering about actual width.

While last year the retail email holiday season began on Sept. 6 with a holiday reference in a Sam's Club email, this year's holiday email season has already begun. Hallmark kicked things off with a reference to holiday ornaments in an Aug. 14 email and KB Toys followed up last week with emails about the "Season's Hottest Pre-orders."

No, not those killer bees. These Killer Bs are a nasty swarm of words used by marketers who haven't caught on that marketing by email has evolved from its earliest days. Whenever I hear someone toss a Killer B around in conversation, I know I'm talking to someone who still sees email marketing as a one-way channel, pushing a single message out to as many people as possible. Permission, segmentation, targeting and relevance don't matter to them. We can't completely change marketing until we change the words we use to describe it, raising some to prominence and mothballing others.

f you're like me, you may have been confused by the recently published article,"The Seven Dirty Words You Can't Say in Email Subject Lines (Plus 100 Others You Shouldn't Use, Either)." Not being a deliverability expert, I put out the bat signal to my discussion group, the Inbox Insiders "Since your spam score is a composite of many factors," I asked, "a word in your subject line, while contributing to your score, isn't enough to affect your deliverability. Or is it?"The experts weighed in.

You never have a second chance to make a first impression. This holds true in our personal lives as well as our professional lives. And as marketers it definitely holds true with our relationship with our customers. So how does this idea of making a good first impression and molding and managing customer experiences and opinions translate into the email space? Two words -- welcome email.

Last week SubscriberMail released "The Seven Dirty Words you can't say in subject lines; plus 100 others you shouldn't use either, " a list of words you "should avoid" using in your subject lines because they are likely to get you blocked by spam filters. Looking at this list, I knew that major online retailers used at least some of these words -- and some of them quite frequently.

Last week at this time, I was relaxing poolside with a prickly pear margarita at our timeshare resort in Scottsdale, Arizona. All the time I was sitting there working on my Email Insider column, I kept seeing how my resort experience underlined some key email lessons.