The Taliban publicly revealed its entire 400-name email list of public relations contacts last week when a spokesperson emailing to the list imported it into the CC field of a mail instead of the BCC field. The organization maintains the list principally to claim credit for attacks.

Email continues to reign supreme in ROI, with social media coming in ahead of SEO, according to the 2012 Digital Optimizer Survey. Published by Lyris, the study highlights the most digital marketing practices as well as future investments. More than half of the marketers surveyed report that triggered messages generate the greatest ROI, and the biggest challenges cited by marketers were increasing the number of subscribers and sending relevant messages. 

To underscore its functionality as a platform for widespread communication, Twitter now allows users to email tweets directly from the web. The functionality will appear in a new "More" icon next to the "Favorite" icon. It is not clear if the sender of the email will be the email address of the logged in user, or if the emails will come from Twitter itself. 

A study by Mimecast that surveyed 2500 information workers has found that they spend an average of four hours per day reading, writing and responding to email. That is the equivalent of 111 full days of work per year. Only one in four are satisfied with the functionality of email and one in three expect email and social to converge in the next five years. 

From a USPS steamship in 1887, to horse-drawn USPS buggies, the first airmail service in 1918, and the iconic 3-wheeled "Mailsters" of the 1950s, the visual history of the USPS is comprised mostly of vehicles used to transport letters and packages.

Salesforce has launched Marketing Cloud, an integration of its recent social applications Radian6 and BuddyMedia, which provide social workflow and allow the company's clients to target social users by sentiment, age, location, emotion and intention. Salesforce's new focus on social mirrors the similar investments of the email services company that integrate with the company, making for an uneasy truce.

Major investments are flowing into marketing technology currently, through the public markets, venture capital and M&A activity. Gartner predicts that a third of marketing budgets will soon be devoted to CRM, predictive analysis and e-commerce, and by 2017 CMOs will be spending more on technology than their CIO counterparts. 

Email services provider Emma is giving away a lifetime worth of free email service, along with free custom design and training, to 25 non-profits. 2012 is the eighth year Emma has held the program, which is open to any 501c3 company with 10 or fewer employees. Applications are due by December 3, 2012. 

A study by CMI/Compass that has tracked physicians' preferences for communication from drugmakers since 2009 has revealed that 66% of doctors prefer to hear from pharma reps by email, a number that has risen by 8% since 2009 as fewer primary care physicians serving more patients have less time for in-person visits. Direct mail is a surprising second, with 65% of doctors preferring that reps send printed information through the mail - a percentage that has doubled since 2009. The other key finding in the study is the number of channels that physicians chose. In 2009 doctors selected 1.6 channels …

Later this month the Senate Judiciary Committee will vote on a revision to the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) of 1986, the result of which would afford more privacy protection to personal emails. Under the current law police only need an administrative subpoena signed with a judge's approval to read emails that have been opened or are more than 180 days old. To obtain the subpoena, the police officer only needs to swear that the contents of an email are relevant to the investigation. When the law was passed in 1986, however, there was no anticipation of the massive online …