Here's my least favorite opening to an email solicitation from a company I do business with. I got this today:

Dear Carson,

Please do not reply to this message it is coming from an unmonitored email account.

Nothing like that personal connection. What a blunder. Don't do this with your email communications. Honestly, it's not that hard to be accessible. And don't you want your customers to talk to you?

How about ending each email communication with a comment like: "Please reply to this message with your feedback, I'd love to hear from you."

Imagine the impact that would have on your customer... and on you.

Sorry, but this just isn't a good idea.

In short, Microsoft will allow spammers to pay a bond of $20K and promise to obey the CAN-SPAM rules and they get to email the whole 170 million regular Hotmail users.

2 Reasons it's bad:
1) MS could get greedy and mean and not allow any commercial email through unless they pony up the bond bucks. That would be a shame for small companies with newsletter subscriber lists full of avid fans. They just wouldn't be able to play along.
2) Spammers get the green light to send spam, so long as they "comply" -- uh huh. And who gets to make that determination? Sounds like just another loophole that spammers will squeeze through. No thanks.

I know this doesn't have an easy solution, but this seems like a step in the wrong direction.

This really drives me nuts.

Never create an email message with multiple columns. It's a horrible pain to read. For example, on the screen shot example below you see 3, THREE columns. So I'm supposed to be SOOOO interested in your email that I'm willing to scroll this crazy long thing up and down 3 times just to take it all in? Get real.

1 column is all you get. And be concise. I want to skim over your email looking for good bits to read, and I want it presented to me 1 item at a time. If I find something I like, I'll pause to read or click. When I get a visual overload like this, insta-turn-off. Honestly, no one loves your emails as much as you do. No one is willing to invest the kind of time it takes to sort out this hodge-podge of self-congratulatory happy talk. K.I.S.S. reminder time.

Rotten:

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Much, much better:

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A couple additional things to note about this well created email:
1) Approx read-time (nice touch)
2) Table of Contents at the top (this one isn't perfect, but the idea is great)