The future of personalization - It's not putting the name in the subject line - the consensus was that this looks "spammy". Rather, it is visual relevance. A number of big brand and large volume email marketers are providing direct links to personalized landing pages and customer portals. It is part of an overall marketing shift from a product focus to a customer focus. People are simply too complex to be defined or understood by product purchases alone, especially with a medium as sensitive and relational as email.

Spam in decline - Various surveys at the convention reported that spam volumes have been in decline for the past few months now, and that people are now less uncomfortable with it. Also, high volume emailers such as Sony report significantly fewer spam complaints on an ongoing basis, partly due to their own efforts of containment.

Email audience may have peaked - Remember the old rule of thumb that the average person has about 6 permission email relationships in them? That is about to be tested in North America at least, now that just about everyone has an email address. Marketers are responding with an even older rule of thumb - the 80/20 rule - and directing their efforts to responders vs. non-responders.

RSS (for Real Simple Syndication) - This potentialy new e-marketing channel is getting a lot of buzz, that's all it is so far. It is a way of feeding rapidly changing news and information to anyone who subscribes. It does not work through the email channel so is immune from issues of spam and message blocking. However, neither can one forward a message and tracking is difficult. In other words, strictly 'early adopter' at this point.