Sam Yin, a computer engineer who was fired by Gucci under suspiscion of selling Gucci products for a profit after racking up $105,000 in employee discounted, was sentenced to 2-6 years in prison for taking revenge against the email systems of the luxury brand. Yin used an electronic profile he planted in the system a year earlier to erase files and crash the email servers, causing $200,000 in damage. 

If fans of a brand will wear a shirt with its logo, post on its Facebook wall or champion its products in Amazon.com reviews, might they also adopt its domain name for their own email address? Crown Fried Chicken thinks so, and is allowing its customers and fans to create their own @CrownFriedChicken.com email addresses. 

A hole in Facebook's scraping protections is blamed for a spate of spam emails sent from compromised email accounts to their Facebook friends lists. The messages were personalized, both with the spoofed sender's name and the name of the recipient. According to Facebook, the incident was isolated and "was neither a mass compromise of Facebook accounts nor any leak of private information."

According to a new report by Knotice, mobile email open rate during the first half of 2012 was 36%, up from 27% for the last half of 2011. The report also predicts a "mobile tipping point" where brands will see the majority of their opens occurring on mobile devices within the next 6-12 months. 

A email case study conducted by AWeber Communications pitted clevery-crafted subject lines (e.g. "Threadless’ Frequency Alert: Hot or Not?") against clearer and more straightforward constructs (e.g. "43 Free Animated GIFs For Your Email Campaign"). Clarity emerged as the clear winner, garnering an average of 541% more response across a range of engagement metrics. 

Cross-Selling and Up-Selling present email marketers with the opportunity to reach customers with targeted and relevant offers. Doing it well requires taking advantage of data from multiple sources (sales records and email behavioral data), recruiting resources that allow for the merchandising, analytic and technology solutions that product the highest likelihood of success, and identifying the most apporiate time to send each message. 

In February, over 3000 of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad were released to the Guardian. This week, the hacker who obtained the emails explained how he gained access to the President's account once he identified the President's personal email address. "You always call the heads of regimes morons, so let's try to work like morons," he told The Times of Israel. Immediately one of the hackers working on the project tried the password "1234" and successfully logged in.

As email evolves, much of what were previously considered best practices are now counterproductive. For example, auto-inserting a name is not personalization; the Rule of 7 (which posits that your audience needs to hear your message 7 times before responding) is liable to earn more spam complaints than conversions; and double opt-in makes up in subscriber quality what it gives up in quantity.

The latest version of Confluence (an enterprise Wiki developed by Atlassian) includes a feature called "WorkBox," which functions as a task management activity stream, similar to the way many people use and organize inboxes. Similar products are available by Asana Inbox and Yammer Inbox, and ail aimed at reducing email volume. External task management applications are an approach in contrast to task management within the inbox. Harmon.ie and Qontext, for example, aim to make the inbox more functional at task management, instead of trying to replace the inbox with a separate application entirely.

Marketing Services Provider Epsilon has launched the Email Response Network, allowing brands to automatically deploy messages to individual subscribers based on when they are most likely to click on them. Drawing on data from all its email clients and emphasizing clicks over opens, the service operates much like a targeted display ad network, serving email messages based on individual behavioral data. For example, a subscriber who regularly checks mail on her iPhone first thing in the morning would be more likely to respond to a promotion to download a new mobile app when on that device. A message requiring more …