"Though all things Internet seem to move at the speed of light and come or go overnight, commercial email marketing is, impressively, approaching its 15th anniversary," writes Karen Talavera in an article at MarketingProfs.

And as we celebrate the channel's longevity, it's important to remember that best practices aren't evergreen. Strategies that worked back when email was a babe might now be woefully outdated—or even illegal.

To illustrate how far we've come, Talavera provides this compare-and-contrast snapshot:

List Building. In 1999, the concept of opt-in permission existed, but there was no such thing as CAN-SPAM, and marketers often gathered email addresses any way they could. Quantity mattered more than quality, even though lumbering lists of unresponsive recipients were inefficient. Today, we strive for lean-and-mean lists of highly engaged subscribers who crave the content we send.

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