The email story central to the case of former CIA director David Petreaus is that personal email enjoys very little privacy protection. The affair was discovered when the FBI gained access to the Gmail account of Paula Broadwell, in response to a claim by a Florida woman that she had been threatened. To do so, the FBI needed to obtain a warrant, which was granted by a judge. Google complied with the result, which the company reports it does 90% of the time. And the volume of government requests for access to personal email accounts is on the rise. Google …

In December, IBM plans to release a public beta of Notes and Domino 9.0 Social Edition that will no longer carry the Lotus brand. IBM acquired Lotus in 1995. 

Nearly 3,500 health care providers in Pennsylvania have signed up for a secure email service that will allow them to swap patient information, a first step towards a statewide medical records exchange. The closed, encrypted email system allows patient records, lab results, X-rays and other diagnostic imaging to be sent securely between providers. The system can be accessed through a web browser or its own desktop client application.

Mobile opens have increased 123% in the last 18 months, with 80% of these occuring on iOS devices. The iPhone 5's retina display pushes resolution up to 1136x640, and the new phone also has a screen 176 pixels larger than previous generation iPhones, allwoing for more above the fold content. 

Testing is critical to optimizing an email program, but tests executed inaccurately can cause more damage than good. Testers should be mindful of timing, interpreting results too soon, statistically irrelevant results, unintended consequences and hidden variables.  Read the full article on The Magill Report. 

Skype announced today that it has fixed a security flaw that allowed users to take over another user's account by simply knowing the user's email address. When creating a new account, a new user who entered the email address of an existing user could then re-set the password. Instead of creating a duplicate account, Skype re-assigned the account to the new user. The company repaired the bug quickly today after being notified, but the issue appeared on Russian hacker forums at least two months ago. 

The consumer preference for shorter communications such as text messages and tweets is causing marketers to front-load email messages with important content near the top, and even in the subject line. The casualty of this practice is the post script, which has been in practice since the 16th century and which until recently was used to carry the message's most important points. 

A new study by Edelman and The Ponemon Institute surveying 6,400 executives finds that 60% believe their companies do not consider consumer privacy a priority, and more than half do not believe a privacy breach would damage their brands. This is in start contrast to the consumer response, where 80% would shift their accounts from banks that accessed personal information without permission and 70% would dump healthcare providers that did the same. 

Your busy subscribers are pulled in even more directions during the holidays, so your calls to action have to be especially simple, actionable and short.  Read the full story on the iContact blog. 

Some Microsoft Cloud email customers were reporting intermittent access to email. Similar outages were reported just five days ago. Microsoft acknowledged the outage on Twitter but has provided no details on what may have caused it or how many users have been affected.