A military voting bill in Kentucky was passed unanimously by the state's Senate Committee on Veterans, but only after a provision allowing servicemen and women to vote via email was stripped. Proponents of the measure point out that only 80% of military absentee ballots were counted due to mailed-in ballots arriving too late or being lost altogether. Opponents of the measure said that internet and email voting were only left in the bill because of a drafting error. 

The trillion spam messages worldwide currently sent every month began with a message sent by an enterprising computer salesperson to 600 users of the original ARPANET system. DEC marketing executive Gary Thuerk used ARPANET to let all its users know about a new operating system available from DEC that would support ARPANET, and used an (all caps) email message to invite users to demo events the company was hosting in California. 

Email-focused market research company The Relevancy Group has hired Chris Marriott as its new VP of Services and Principal Consultant. Marriott was formerly the Vice President of Agency Services at StrongMail and held a similar position at Acxiom. The Relevancy Group's CEO and Co-Founder David Daniels cited Marriott's background in both the agency and marketer communities as useful in "implementing efforts to integrate e-mail with other digital channels."

A study by Vocus and Edge Research ranks advertising channels by effectiveness, based on survey responses from over 600 marketing decision-makers at small and medium-sized businesses. The SMBs ranked TV Advertising, Events and Trade Shows, and Radio Advertising as being the most effective marketing channel. Email was near the bottom of the list, below SEO, Online Display Ads and Social Media, but above Direct Mail and Print Mail. 

Twitter is the latest large email sender to have implemented the DMARC standard for preventing email spoofing. DMARC is an authentication standard that makes it harder for attackers to send phishing emails that appear to come from twitter.com addresses. The company reported its adoption of DMARC on its blog today.

The latest Warc Global Marketing Index finds that marketing budgets are on the rise for the second month in a row. Budgets rose in all three regions tracked, with confidence highest in the Americas. 

With employees busily stashing data across a myriad of cloud-based services, companies are at risk of "fracturing of the enterprise brain," a condition that Huddle CEO Alistair Mitchell believes can destroy corporate knowledge and weaken a company's ability to access its own intellectual property. The problem is that the disseminated data and information is no longer under the control of IT, with individual users and department setting up rogue accounts on Dropbox, Google Drive and Amazon Web Services.

Family-friendly email provider Kids Email has launched an iPad and iPhone app called Kmail. The service provides filtered email addresses to kids with a number of parental restrictions, including the ability to only mail people already on contact lists and a parental screening queue. Kids Email has over 30,000 users.

Google has taken to its Google Official Blog to inform its users what the company is doing to combat spam directed at Gmail accounts. The company claims that less than 1% of spam emails make it to Gmail inboxes because of the specialized anti-spam tools it uses. It has also adjusted its spam tactics to counter the increase in messages from compromised accounts, starting with an assessment of the threat level of account logins. "Every time you sign in to Google, whether via your Web browser once a month or an email program that checks for new mail every five …

A soon-to-be-released study by Edge Research and Vocus finds that 15% of SMB marketing budgets is spent on email, making it the largest expenditure among the 601 SMB marketers surveyed. Companies with lower revenues are likely to spend an even higher percentage on email, with the channel accounting for 18% of budgets among businesses under $5 million in sales per year. 56% of marketers surveyed plan to increase email spending, second only to social media spending at 60%.