I've received over 500 emails so far this year in which the subject line included my first name. "Morgan, Book Now & Save on Top Travel Deals" "Morgan - Congratulations! Your Nomination to Cambridge Who's Who!" "Morgan, Get Dad a 58" Samsung Widescreen."

When I see an email with my name in the subject line, my first thought is not "Phew! These guys know my name!" No, it's become a red flag for spam.

He's spot-on: these days seeing my name in the subject line is almost a sure sign of spam. Read the entire post here.

Good to know I share good company on the Cambridge Who's Who list.

In short:

Omnivore is a program that runs in the background and analyzes email campaign and user account data. Non-stop.

When it finds anything suspicious about a MailChimp user or his campaigns, it’ll do one of two things:

1. Send the user a warning for something that looks problematic.
2. Suspend a user’s account for something bad, send them a warning, and alert our abuse team to investigate the account.

The long version is at the link and the impressive part is how much data and prediction they are incorporating into the tool to help them avoid sending campaigns that will damage their sending reputation in the long run. It's not just about filtering the mail stream to make sure it's not going to trip filters, but watching the list management practices of their customers.

This is the kind of thing that all ESPs are going to have to start doing moving toward, using internal systems to ensure that the right message is being sent to the right people, then combined with tools like Adaptive Delivery and real-time bounce and feedback loop processing to make sure that the messages are being sent in the right way.

Some days I'd just like to see what a company like MailChimp would do with our toolset, give them a messaging server with internal scripting that can hook into their datasources and I'd wager some very cool things would come out.