Tomorrow, December 12, is the second annual No Email Day. Launched last year by a man in the UK, the concept was so appealing to consumers that it was picked up by the Wall Street Journal and other press. Participants are encouraged to ignore their inbox all day and use other means of contacting each other, such as face-to-face, phone calls and even writing letters. 

Microsoft announced today that Outlook.com now has support for the DMARC standard, which makes it harder for individuals to deliver phishing or spam emails. The service is also scheduled to receive support for extended validation (EV) certificates later this week, which aim to prevent websites from pretending to be other sites in order to execute a scam or fraudulent transaction.

The rumored relaunch of Yahoo! mail occurred today, with new navigation and features that the company claims will reduce the amount of time each user spends in the inbox. The company has also overhauled its Android app and launched an iPhone app. 

William Binney, a former code-breaker for the NSA turned whistleblower against government agencies, claims that the FBI records the email of nearly all US citizens and is able to access up to 10 years of email history for anyone targeted by the government. Binney claims that the email data is being recorded during transmission and not from the ISPs such as Google and Yahoo. 

Gmail experienced an outage today, leaving many users (and subscribers) unable to access their email. Because this issue was with users' logins, Gmail was still accepting email messages. This means that deliverability of campaigns sent to Gmail addresses should not be compromised, but opens and clicks will be delayed or possibly depressed if a flood of queued up messages rushes into inboxes all at once. Read the full article on the Responsys blog.

Microsoft is reportedly planning to begin heavy promotion of Outlook.com this week, using messages to its existing Hotmail users encouraging them to switch to the new service, as well as advertisements. Microsoft admits that a third of Gmail users are former Hotmail users and that Outlook.com aims to win them back.

Research by Eloqua on email trends within the personal insurance vertical suggests that insurers are sending too many emails. Unsubscribe rates have risen steadily, peaking at 5.5% in September. Over the same period, click rates have eroded and click-to-open rates have shown a lot of variance towards a downward trend as well. 

A new email trends report from Epsilon shows improved email performance in Q3 2012 across many important metrics. Open rate rose to 27.2%, a 6.5% lift over the previous quarter and 14.6% higher Y-O-Y. Click rates were also up a modest 0.1%, but it was the first quarter-over-quarter increase since a year ago. Triggered emails as well continued to show their engagement superiority. While open rates dropped to 47.7% from 49.8% the previous quarter, they still vastly outperform the business-as-usual emails.

For most people, the act of deleting an email simply means removing it from their view of the application. After deletion, however, most emails still remain on company or ISP servers. And even after deletion from company servers, there still remains evidence that the message once existed, including the name of the message. Accordinging to the staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, "I think the most important thing for people to understand that you can't really ever delete anything."

In the rush to maximize holiday sales, many retailers make mistakes that cost them revenue and conversion. Overmailing, inconsistent timing, missed promotion opportunities and absent inventory counts all contribute to an email program performing below its capacity during the most critical season of the year. Read the full article on the Silverpop blog.