Steve Vavrek, a Connecticut Republican has come under fire for sending two Democrats an email solicitation for campaign contributions and invites to a cocktail party fundraiser. The Democratic Registrar of Voters Sue Koneff and Board of Education member Alan Vaglivelo filed a complaint with the SEEC in which they claimed that the email, which was funded by Vavrek For Monroe, goes against state election law. The two allege that the Republican was "deliberately misappropriating" email addresses for personal gain. These addresses are maintained by the town of Monroe for municipal communication only.

British officials at the Cabinet Office are taking a 'no email day,' on Thursday in a move to fight inbox overload. While officials will respond to outside business, they are planning to communicate in-house with face-to-face meetings or phone calls rather than sending emails. The idea came to the government by the through Stephen Kelly, the Government's Chief Operating Officer and a former Nasdaq executive, who was brought in to make work processes more efficient.

Pentecostal preacher Joshua Dubois has been emailing short Christian reflections to president Barack Obama every day for more than five years. Dubois started sending this daily email during the 2008 presidential campaign when he worked for Obama. Dubois is publishing a book with 365 of these daily devotionals called The President's Devotional.

Vietnamese criminals pretending to be U.S.-based private investigators duped Experian into selling them the private data of users, according to reports. Experian reportedly leaked social security numbers, driver's license numbers, bank account, credit card data and birthdates of what might be millions of Americans to the online criminals. The fraudsters resold the data to other sites including Superget.info.

Mexico has criticized the United States after revelations that the US NSA was spying on the Mexican president Felipe Calderon and reading his email back in 2010. The news broke over the weekend, when German magazine Der Spiegel reported that the NSA had hacked into Calderon's public email account while he was president. The Mexican government responded by stating, "This practice is unacceptable, illegal and against Mexican and international law."

The National Security Agency has been spying on French officials and the French government is mad. The latest revelations from documents leaks by Edward Snowden show that the NSA recorded 70 million digital communications from Dec. 10, 2012, to Jan. 8, 2013. French officials have demanded that the U.S. stop spying. The French government called the practice "totally unacceptable" according to reports.

With constant news about how the NSA is spying on your email and Gmail getting sued for scanning emails to serve ads, many consumers are looking for alternative ways to make their emails safe. Outside of just not using email, PC World columnist Lincoln Spector argues that we could easily have free end to end email encryption through OpenPGP, but he thinks that universal acceptance by the major email clients and providers will never happen. Until it does, he recommends using a service called Sendinc to send private messages.

The latest revelations from whistleblower Edward Snowden unveiled the fact that the United States's National Security Agency hacked into the email of the Mexican president back in 2010. The hacking took place whenFelipe Caldern was in office. According to a report in the German news site Spiegel Online, the NSA called the covert spying operation, "Tailored Access Operations." The process involved exploiting a key mail server in the Mexican Presidencia domain within the Mexican Presidential network.

Digital marketing services company Pointdrive has introduced a new tool that can turn typical email attachments into more visual communications channels. The platform will turn an email attachment into an image based document and will feature images alongside text. The platform has reporting tools, to that senders can measure who opened their messages.

Video marketing platform Vidyard has teamed up with ExactTarget to help make video in email easier to use Vidyard built an app for ExactTarget, which allows ET clients to embed visual links to video content within their email messages. The tool has reporting features that tell marketers who viewed the videos, and how long they watched.