Fairly early on in the second generation, e-mail was one of the areas that marketers focused on. It was a great way to get in front of your target market on a regular basis to get traffic to your Web site, to increase brand recognition, and to promote your products or services.

Mail list programs were introduced that enable marketers to build their databases. Permission marketing became very important. Mail list software was integrated with your Web site to reduce or eliminate the need for manual administration activities. Personalization in the subject line, salutation, and body of the e-mail became a standard feature. The mail list database was developed so segmentation was easily achieved, allowing you to send strategic communication to select portions of your database.

We saw legislation introduced related to privacy issues, spam, pornography, and commercial e-mails. As people got sick and tired of receiving spam, we saw wide adoption of spam filters on both the individual recipient and the ISP levels. With that came the need for all marketers to run all outgoing marketing messages through spam checkers.