Return Path reports that consumer adoption of iOS 6 has been startlingly quick, with 2/3 of all iPhone opens occuring on the new operating system a month after its launch. The company also reports that iPod Touch email opens have declined steadily over the past year. iPad email opens have leveled off, though the company believes that may be consumer anticipation of the iPad Mini and expects the percentage of opens on the iPad to increase again after the holidays.

Mailbox, a new inbox management app for the iPhone from the makers of Orchestra, has launched in Beta and is quickly winning fans among the technorati, with TechCrunch's Michael Arrington calling it "the real deal" and beta testers lauding its intuitive features. The app treats the inbox like a to-do list, allowing users to employ simple swiping gestures to archive, delete or save emails for later. The latter is its most interesting feature, as it allows iPhone users to time-shift email for a few hours, a day, or even until the weekend. 

Online electronics retailer ZAGG relies heavily on its blog content to attract an audience, posting 25-35 times per week on a variety of topics. The company tests each blog post on its audience of 30K Twitter followers, selecting only those with the most retweets and replies to roll out to its 200K Facebook fans. Only the posts that receive a high number of likes, comments and shares on Facebook qualify for inclusion in the company's emails. 

Newsletters are the most popular type of email messages, used by 89% of email marketers according to a November 2012 study by Lyris. Promotions and discounts are a close second at 86%, followed by free content at 76%. The study also tracked techniques used by digital marketers and found that 85% use list segmentation and targeting. 

Several years ago, Yahoo was considered a global leader in mobile through its "Connected Life" initiative. More recently, the company has languished in mobile, as evidenced by the absence of an iPhone app for Yahoo Mail until just this week. The relaunch of Yahoo Mail, coupled with today's launch of a Flickr app, signals a renewed focus on mobile at Yahoo under the guidance of new CEO Marissa Mayer. 

New data released this week by Return Path reveals that 38% of email opens in the US occur on a mobile device. 31% are opened on a desktop client like Microsoft Outlook, while another 31% are opened in web-based email applications like Gmail and Hotmail. 85% of the mobile opens occurred on Apple devices.

Facebook's propsal to relax restrictions on unsolicited contanct to members via the Facebook email system was put to a membership vote last week. 589K of the 669K who voted (88%) opposed the proposal, but Facebook adopted it anyway as the number of voters who opposed the plan was less than 30% of Facebook's total membership. Facebook said that it did amend some language in the documents based on user feedback. The adopted proposal will make it easier for individuals and businesses to contact members they do not personally know, which is expected to increase the likelihood of spam.

A survey on 2013 Marketing Trends by StrongMail finds that 89% of businesses plan to increase or maintain their marketing spend in 2013. Leading the list of planned increases is email marketing (56%), social media (52%), mobile (43%) and search (40%). 65% plan to increase email with social media in 2013, while 46% plan to increase spending on email programs designed to grow social media. 

A new study by Freeform Dynamics shows that email is deeply rooted as a communication channel in the enterprise, and especially critical to the sales and marketing, customer service and back office / order processiing functions. Email is also viewed as being the most broadly adopted office productivity and collaboration application. 

With the percentage of emails sent by an Email-Generating-Application (EGA) on the rise, the shift to cloud-based messaging becomes complicated. As a result, hybrid infrastructures combining server-based and cloud-based sending are likely to become more prominent.