The tab: $234 million. The winner: MySpace. Ars Technica reports.

Takeaway for marketers: If you’re not observing CAN-SPAM legislation in your email marketing by now, you’re a schmuck.

Lyris is, as DMNews reports , and they’re doing so by ISP. If you have a lot of Hotmail addresses on your opt-in email list, only about 57 percent of your email is getting through to your customers.

Takeaway for marketers: Are you thinking about ways to maximize delivery across all touchpoints? For example, when customers sign up for your email list, actively ask them to whitelist your "from" address.

Merkle is "one of the nation’s largest and fastest growing providers of data-driven solutions that enable organizations to maximize the results from their marketing investment." (No, that’s not language generated from this page , it’s from their press release boilerplate.)

Put your Buzzword Bingo card aside and click on through to this press release on their site, which trumpets the new 2008 version of their annual email study, View From the Inbox. You can get the .pdf file over here .

DMNews leads their coverage of the report with the factoid that "88% of consumers feel mostly or completely in control of their inboxes." Count me among the 12, but that’s another kettle of albatross.

I think the most interesting information in the report has to do with the reasons why your email list may not be growing as quickly as you like.

Why are people unsubscribing from email lists? The emails aren’t relevant (73 percent), companies are sending email too often (66 percent), they never signed up for the list in the first place (64 percent) and the emails weren’t what they expected when they signed up (63 percent).

Takeaway for marketers: You’re working hard to build an email list. Don’t fool your customers on the front end to get them to subscribe and be sure to give them what they want once they have subscribed. Remember: It’s about what your customers want, not about what you want your customers to want.

Gerry McGovern nails it over here on the Giraffe Forum .

Takeaway for marketers: What it says in the headline … unless, of course, you have infinite money to spend and you don’t really care about your customers.

Military marketing language always makes me sorta cringe. I’ve done a lot of work on products for kids, and no parent I know feels good when their child is "targeted." Marketing "campaigns" are "launched" like missiles, but too often the marketing departments fail to arm the warheads.

But a co-worker sent me this Inc.com article yesterday written by software guy Joel Spolsky . I was sorta cringing as I read it, given that it was shaping up to be one mighty military metaphor. Then I got to this part:

"Instead of paying attention to what your competitors are doing, start reading your customer feedback email personally. Get online and listen to what people are saying about your products. Keep a running tally of what customers ask for through your company’s Web site. If you actually do this, you’ll probably stand apart from the crowd in your industry."

Bingo.

Takeaway for marketers: Are you paying more attention to your customers or your competitors?