According to Mediapost, Epsilon (part of Alliance Data Systems) bought Bigfoot Interactive for $120 million, and is changing the company’s name to Epsilon Interactive. (We like "Bigfoot" better!)

Bigfoot’s annual revenues are about $30 million, so the deal is worth approximately 4X.

According to this eMarketer analyst report, email marketing is not as dead as you thought. 71% of U.S. online advertisers used direct email in 2004 – mostly for retention programs. As a legitimate email marketer, the challenges are getting past spam filters and fighting the increasing volume of commercial email in a consumer’s inbox.

Return Path (recently acquired Net Creations) and has now acquired Iron Poart’s Bonded Sender – a company that enables legitimate email senders to post a bond to guarantee that they are not sending spam. But this study (subscription required: you can view a summary here) from June 2004, found that 35% of the generated fines – from email recipient complaints – were inappropriate. Has this been fixed?