Don Tapscott, author, strategist and University of Toronto professor, believes that companies must move past email for knowledge management and into a collaborative suite of social product, because email containerizes knowledge instead of opening it to collaboration. "E-mail is sort of like what Mark Twain said about the weather," Tapscott remarked. "Everybody’s talking about it, and nobody’s doing anything about it. We have to get rid of e-mail."

Many of the latest firewall, spam filter and VPN appliances sold by Barracuda Networks contain undocumented backdoor accounts, the company disclosed today. While the backdoor accounts are apparently set up so that they would only be accessible from Internet addresses assigned to Barracuda, they are in fact accessible to potentially hundreds of other companies and network owners. A security researcher at SEC Consult Vulnerability Lab found the backdoors, along with evidence that they may have existed since 2003.

Email marketers are quick to tie topical events into promotions. Elite Email has analyzed campaign trends in January and found that the Super Bowl and playoffs are a popular contextual lead-in again this year. One difference from 2011 however is the incorporation of game outcomes into promotions, such as offering Promotion A if one team wins, and Promotion B if the other is victorious. In these campaigns a second message is sent immediately following the game to announce the winning team and promotion, a tactic that builds engagement and anticipation.

Optify has released its "2012 B-to-B Marketing Benchmark Report" which finds that email bests all other sources of web traffic when it comes to conversion rate. A study of 62 million visits from 350,000 leads across 600 companies revealed that the conversion rate of email was 2.89%, 81% higher than the average of 1.6% and 42% higher than second-place referrals at 2.04%.

A survey of 4,400 iPad owners by Perion finds that 97% use the device to read email and 90% say that being able to read email on the iPad is either "very important" or "extremely important." Two-thirds also report checking email on their iPad more than three times per day. Two-thirds of respondents send email from their iPad with just under a third reporting that it is the only device through which they send mail.

Bronto Software now enables retailers to import past-purchase data from any e-commerce or order system in order to power remarketing campaigns. The new functionality allows marketers to use products ordered, purchase channel and other order information to generate reports and create segments for targeted messages.

50% of consumers report that seeing their name spelled incorrectly in a personalized email would cause them to resent once-favored brands, according to a study by Emailvision. Mixing up gender by calling a Miss a Mr. or vice versa is almost as equally annoying at 40%.

Researchers at UC Berkley and UC San Diego set out to determine if spam is profitable by launching a spam business of their own. They infiltrated the "Storm network" which uses hijacked home PCs to distribute spam and were able to send 350,000,000 emails promoting an online pharmacy offering herbal libido enhancements. Deliverability was poor at under 25%, but that still allowed 82.7 million messages to reach computers. 10,522 clicks drove 28 purchases of $100 each, for a daily income of $140 for the campaign. The researchers only tapped 1.5% of the Storm network for their test. By extrapolating to …

Small business marketing platform InfusionSoft has announced its acquisition of GroSocial, a social media marketing company that helps brands improve their social presence and grow social audiences. Earlier this month InfusionSoft received $54 million in funding from Goldman Sachs.

Email ad network LaunchBit has introduced a new service called The Email Newsletter Report Card. The service pulls in analytics from a marketer's email service provider and then compares them to over 300 million other sends in its database in order to score messages on engagement, content details and subscriber details.