Cloud-based message provider Message Bus announced today the industry's first on-time delivery guarantee for transactional email messages, promising that password resets, delivery confirmations, abandoned shopping cart notifications and receipts will be handed off to the recipient's ISP within 30 seconds. 

A new study by International Data Corp predicts that by 2020 the amount of digital data created, replicated and consumed by every person on the planet will equal 5,200 gigabytes per year, 50 times more than today's levels. This rise in data volume will also mean a rise in data's value as currency, causing companies to change their behavior in order to collect and protect it. 

After analyzing employee communication patterns and finding that the average employee spent 40% of his/her time on internal emails that added no value to the business, the U.K.'s Halton Housing Trust will phase out internal email by 2014. During the analysis, the company learned that 75,000 of the 95,000 emails sent by employees were internal, as were the 68% of the 127,000 received emails. The company has not yet decided which channel(s) of communication will replace email and will review options throughout 2013.

Cox Communications has restored email service today after a storage failure left residential customers in the Midwest and East Coast without email access on Friday. The company reports that it has stored all messages intended for its customers and will release them for delivery on a rolling basis. "We will remain intensely focused on this effort until all queued email messages are successfully delivered," a Cox representative said in a statement. 

Website intelligence networks, such as LeadLender, are able to provide website owners with the email addresses of people who visit their sites, even if the visitors do not provide the information to the site during their visit. By tracking form submissions across multiple sites, these networks are able to pair an email address and other personally identifiable information to technographic information like a visitor's IP address. The practice has incited controversy among privacy advocates and many in the advertising and direct marketing communities.

Wanderful Media has released results from a survey of over 1,000 shoppers and finds that 91% have gone into a physical store because of some sort of online promotions. Email leads the types of promotions that drive in-store visits at 60%, followed by online coupons at 59% and online ads promoting a sale at 56%. 

With the number of people reading emails on mobile devices increasing every month, responsive design that reformats emails for optimized viewing on different devices is rising in popularity as well. See some examples of how emails in different formats use responsive design to create attractive layouts on both mobile and desktop/web devices.  Read the full article on the Lyris blog.

According to the Forrester Research "Benchmark Your Brand-Building Capabilities" report, only 36% of marketers responded that they are consistently managing their brand experience across all customer touch points.  The study also found 91% believe a clear understanding of the customer is extremely or very important for effective brand building.

Software company Varonis has published a study that finds 1 in 10 workers have over 10,000 emails in their inbox at any given time. The report has also found that almost a quarter of workers receive between 100 and 1,000 new emails per day and that 40% spend at least half an hour a day (120 hours or 3 full weeks per year) dealing with email overload. Full inboxes lead to productivity decreases in other ways as well, with 43% taking "virtual coffee breaks" at news and other websites to escape the overwhelming email volume.

Paul Levinson, professor of communication and media studies at Fordham Universities believes the relaunch of Yahoo Mail and its new mobile apps may have arrived just in time to protect the company's share of the inbox market. "I think people mainly maintain a Yahoo email account to route spam and junk mail into, and as an alternative account in case the Google system goes down," he said, and saw Yahoo headed in the same direction as AOL mail some years back.