Okay, so maybe that’s not “big,” but it does stand to set a precedent.

In response to the NY AG’s similar accusations, Tagged founder Greg Tseng explained that Tagged’s registration process is abundantly clear, including several screenshots of the registration process (PDF), such as this:

Which could easily support either of these lawsuits, especially since the California case states

Tagged harvested millions of email addresses from the email address books of consumers. Then, using these consumers’ email account credentials, Tagged sent unsolicited advertisements to the harvested email addresses, making the messages appear as if they were invitations to join Tagged sent by persons known to the recipients.

The complaint says that the site also failed to make it clear that the users were registering for the site or sharing their friends’ email addresses (which doesn’t seem to be supported from Tagged’s screenshots of the process), and that these practices violate the federal Stored Communications Act and Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

To date, no social site has been successfully sued for similar practices. Tagged notes that inviting friends is the lifeblood of social sites’ growth, but often the practice is executed in such a way that looks like abuse.

What do you think? Do these examples look like abuse? Will this be enough to get a ruling in court, or will the case be thrown out like the suit against Reunion.com last year?

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So why shouldn’t you waste money on email marketing?

Because wasting money is bad—and why waste money when you can make sure your email marketing is even more cost effective?

The Forrester study takes a look at the email marketing forecast for the next five years, and there’s good news: email will continue to grow in popularity among users and marketers alike. Total spending on email marketing will soar to $2B in 2014 (up from $1.2B this year):

Of course, this popularity means that there’s a lot more competition for email users’ time—and a lot more messages bombarding them, and likely to be perceived as spam. With more than 9000 messages per inbox annually by 2014, users will become even more discriminating about what they read.

One of the effects of this is that “retention email”—permission-based email messages targeted at keeping customers—will become increasingly important. This will grow to more than 40% of total email messages annually. This effect also highlights how important it is to make sure that your messages are well-targeted and stand out from the crowd.

Forrester offers a few suggestions in this area:

• Embrace relevancy-empowering tactics, specifically segmentation and dynamic content, as we try to do more with less in the current economy. Also look for innovations coming in this area.
• Increase the use of services, social sharing, and data integration. Because of the integration of the social services in the email inbox (creating what Forrester calls the “social inbox”), email marketers may have to do as the Facebookers do. They should also use more “web analytics data, [build] more robust subscriber
  profiles, [use] engagement-based targeting, and [use] share-to-social mechanisms.”
• Make today’s best practices tomorrow’s required practices. In addition to maintaining good, current email lists (see more below), marketers will also see behavior-driven engagement messaging tactics, such as sending unique

  messaging to “clickers” and “non-clickers,” become commonplace. Relevant email marketers and ESPs will see growth.

Also, to further increase the cost-effectiveness of email campaigns, be sure to practice good “list hygiene”—remove bouncing addresses, dedupe, malformed addresses, etc. By 2014 companies will be wasting up to $144M on email messages that never reach consumers’ mailboxes. Forrester also recommends sender- and message-level authentication and reputation services to make sure your messages aren’t accidentally caught in ISPs’ spam filters.

What do you think? Do you use email marketing? Do you think its future is looking bright?

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