79% of smartphone owners use their devices to read email while 78% use them to make phone calls, according to the Econsultancy 2013 Digital Publishing Report. Email is also the leading application of tablet owners (79%), ahead of playing games (67%) and Facebook (61%).

Inbox Marketer reports that email open and click rates in Canada rose in 2012, while the same engagement metrics dropped in the U.S. The data is part of the company's annual Email Marketing Trends report. The report also finds that 46% of emails in Canada are opened on mobile devices. 

Outlook.com users have been reporting missing email messages since October following their joining the service. After responding to user complaints on the company's forum by deleting them, Microsoft today finally acknowledged the problem and explained that it was associated with renaming accounts. Microsoft reports that it has fixed many of the user accounts that were having issues and will continue to work on the rest.

The Direct Marketing Association and Neolane fielded a survey of mid-level and executive-level marketers and found that 40% report that their companies have a big data strategy. 37% do not have a strategy in place and 23% are not sure. 57% of respondents believe the biggest benefit of big data is to drive greater campaign conversions. 34% believe customer insight to be big data's greatest upside.

Online video hosting company Wistia increased its conversions to paying customers from free trial by 30% using marketing automation to send drip campaigns to prospects. The campaigns featured blog content and personalized emails and were powered by Pardot, a recent acquisition of ExactTarget.

A rash of recent malware exploits have caused significant damage and expense, including shutting down power plants for three weeks, an $850 million robbery, and the theft of terabytes of information from government embassies. Infestations result from malware finding its way onto an unsuspecting host computer via email attachments and links, as well as USB sticks.

22% of marketers surveyed for a study by Experian Marketing Services report using pop-ups on their websites to collect email addresses. 56% collect email addresses right on the home page of the website. The survey also found that over half of marketers report that they collect less than 25% of their email addresses from their website.

Marketers and consumers agree that email is the channel most in need of investment in 2013, according to a new study by ExactTarget. When asked where marketers should invest more resources this year, email led all responses with 33%. 26% of marketers indicated that email is a channel where they intend to invest more as well, which also led all responses.

While many entrepreneurs are working on apps and filters that marginalize the inbox, others are creating all new ones. Engagio acts as a one-stop inbox for all conversations users have online, organizing replies from Facebook, Twitter, Disqus threads, and many other online discussion platforms. The company got started on $540K in seed capital and is founded by William Mougayar, a former sales and marketing executive at Hewlett-Packard.

Oracle's acquisiton of Eloqua signals that marketing automation, while a hot investment area, is nevertheless a niche solution in the broader fabric of integrated marketing technology. Improving marketing automation and data-driven customer insights remain higher priorities for CMOs.