Email enjoys the reputation of being a greener marketing channel than print, but the enormous data centers that power email systems waste 90% of their energy and run on diesel backup generators. 

A retailer testing remarketing emails to shoppers who abandoned a cart has found that instead of being seen as offensive or intrusive, the messages were instead highly effective, ringing up a 25% conversion rate and generating 1/3 of the site's email-related revenues. 

Following a technical glitch that delayed two email alerts designed to notify traders to stocks with a large volume of buy orders after the closing bell, the NYSE stated that it will use Twitter and Facebook to get the word out. 

Some A/B testing results can be real eye-openers, including one pitting a plain text email against a richly designed HTML piece. The plain text drove 195% more traffic and 304% more revenue. 

The Obama campaign has recently sent emails with the subject lines, "If I don’t call you," "Something lovely," "Frustrated," and "Big things." The Romney campaign telegraphs message content more directly with subject lines like, "My Plan for Jobs and Economic Growth" and "Leadership Defined."

Entrepreneur Ryan Ozonian, CEO of the social gaming startup Mention Mobile, sent a highly targeted email to investor and Shark Tank host Mark Cuban, briefly pitching his company. 99 words and 8 minutes later, he had a reply that lead to an investment of $250,000.

An email sender reputation is like a credit score - having no history is treated the same as having an unsavory history. Because sender reputation is built through frequency and tenure, email marketers who do not mail frequently may benefit from a shared IP, where their sender reputation can piggy-back on the volume and history of other senders using the same IP. The caveat, of course, is that if the other senders compromise the IP's reputation, every sender using it can suffer. 

According to records obtained by the ACLU, the amount of email and network communication captured for monitoring by government agents has increased 360% in the past three years. During the same period the number of people whose private telephone conversations have been monitored has tripled. 

California became the first state today to enact a law prohibiting companies and educational institutions from requesting passwords to the email and social media accounts of existing or prospective employees and students. California Governor Jerry Lee announced the signing of the bills on Facebook, Twitter and Google+. 

An all-day hack-a-thon to create productivity, analytics, collaboration, customer relationship, marketing and document management applications for email is scheduled for October 20th in San Francisco. The top 3 hacks created at the event will have the opportunity to demo to a panel of email experts at the Inbox Love 2 conference in Mountain View on October 24th.