Rick Christ at NPAdvisors.com recently published some research showing that folks who receive email newsletters are more likely to give in response to traditional direct-mail asks. Rick’s experiment is similar to a more comprehsensive study conducted in 2001 by the Stanford University development department showing that, overall, folks who received Stanford’s email newsletter were much more engaged with the institution, financially and otherwise.

These results are not surprising, because anything that makes your members feel more connected to your organization is likely to boost their actual engagement.

There are some interesting thoughts about the problems with “rich-formatted’ HTML email in this article by Jaz-Michael King, entitled HTML Email Isn’t Rich on evolt.

Carl Coryell-Martin just did a great little lunchtime presentation on “How to Empty Your Email Inbox” based on the book “Getting Things Done” by David Allen.

It’s a little long to summzarize here, but this is an incredibly powerful set of processes for, well, getting things done. It has huge implications for how one organizes email and to-do lists in general. I and others at ONE/Northwest will be implementing this for ourselves in the coming months, and maybe we will think about how to help the environmental community implement some of these ideas.

I love it when somebody expands my mind. Thanks, Carl.

Another short article on the forthcoming Exchange Server 2003. Interesting tidbit: “Microsoft has enhanced the Mail Application Programming Interface (MAPI), so that remote workers or telecommuters no longer need a virtual private network (VPN) connection to check e-mail on an Exchange server.” This would be huge for us.

This article has a few more details, including the inclusion of spam filtering.

Mitch Kapor’s new project, codenamed Chandler , is worth keeping an eye on. Although it’s not planned for release until late 2003, it promises an impressive level of peer-to-peer collaboration in an open-source, full-featured email/personal information manager, with no Exchange Server required.

PC Magazine just published a short “sneak preview of Titanium, Microsoft’s next-generation Exchange release. It appears that it’s currently scheduled to ship in mid-2003.

Ever wanted to synchronize your Palm with a public folder on an Exchange Server? Can’t do it with the built-in sync software. Luckily, Dataviz makes Desktop To Go, an inexpensive ($30) product that can. A good trick to have in your bag…

IBM’s Web site has a great background article on various Spam Filtering Techniques. While it does not discuss specific spam-fighting tools, it provides solid background on the approaches of different spam-blockers.

Qualcomm has just released Eudora 5.2. Not a major upgrade, but if you’re a Eudora user, it’s always worthwhile to download the latest version. Eudora 5.2 Download

Interesting. The Mozilla project recently launched Mozilla Calendar, a “Standards Based Calendar Client Project.” Looks like their aim is to create an open-source version of the calendar functionality that is in Microsoft Outlook — with the calendar-sharing functionality that is in Exchange. That would surely be neat.