Your article is right on, and what's so great about it is that it slaps you awake, back into reality.

I read Guerrilla Marketing years ago and it said essentially the same thing -- use outside-in think, not inside-out think. Step outside and look back in to your business, and envision what the customer should be seeing to lure them in and take the hook.

Positioning is also important, but saying what the customer wants to hear to answer what they're looking for is crucial.

It's more than just that. My systems have recently been blacklisted by the blackhole list, and by barracuda, senderscore and spamhous because people who signed up to receive emails from my systems had dropped their email accounts without updating their website delivery settings, resulting in my server continuously hitting their now non-existant mailbox.

Their host systems reported to their anti-spam system who shared that info with all their other anti-spam customers, resulting in a sudden blockage of hundreds of domains.

Simultaneously, in an effort to thwart the sudden increase of spam due to the holidays, several anti-spam systems kicked their rules up a notch and now mandate that every mailserver IP have a valid RDNS record, and every mailserver have a PTR record and an abuse@ and postmaster@ account before they'll whitelist the domain.

In addition, Yahoo has been real bad about greylisting almost every domain until deemed safe. Read about it here:

http://www.ahfx.net/weblog.php?article=107

Comcast uses the SenderScore system which has a "best practices" page:

http://sendersupport.senderscore.net/bestPractices.php

It's getting tougher and tougher to run a bona fide mailserver these days.

I'm a huge fan of alternative xmas tunes. Klezmer Nutcracker is amazing. There's a few holiday samplers floating around out there: "Acoustic Holidays" and "Yuletide Treasures Pop & Rock." Also, music from other countries is a nice change, like Sweden has a ton of short "Potpurri" songs that they interchange with May pole dancing that are fun to listen to (especially if you speak Swedish). Also, I second the Vince Guaraldi Charlie Brown Christmas. It's a classic. Bruce Cockburn's Christmas album is good too, and Ringo Starr's is fun.

God Jul!