Being upfront is paramount to building trust with people. There are three main things you need to establish in order to make a sale (whether that's the "sale" of opening the email to closing that million dollar deal): they need to like you, trust you, and know what you are doing. What many forget is that this needs to happen in this order because if they don't like or trust you, it doesn't matter how much information you have, you'll never make a valuable sale.
Chief Zookeeper and Slave-driver of Velocity Outfitters (http://stores.ebay.com/velocityoutfitters)
Wordsmith Extraordinaire - Looking Towards the Future (http://www.jasonquey.com)
Sarcastic and "exaggerist" to a fault.