Bookseller Half Price Books used an integrated digital marketing campaign on Facebook and email to generate almost 14,000 in-store sales. Working with email services firm ExactTarget, the book retailer launched a "Booklover's Weekend" Facebook tab offering Fans an opportunity to receive get a coupon for signing up for the company's email list. In about a month, the effort generated 36,000 new email subscribers.

A police officer in the Bronx is accused of paying $4,050 to an email-hacking service in order to illegally obtain the usernames and passwords for 43 email inboxes. It is believed that he made the purchase in order to access the email account of his ex-girlfriend. After getting the illegal log-in credentials, he is accused of accessing at least one personal email account belonging to another officer.

The Australian Taxation Office has already received 11,000 reports of scam emails related to taxes in Q1 2013, which is 3x as many as the same time period in 2012. For all of 2012, the office recorded 26,000 scam emails. These spam emails ask citizens to share personal information such as bank account information.

Have you ever wondered how long Nigerian princes have been asking for bank account numbers? It's an old problem. NPR talks with Boston Globe correspondent Finn Brunton about the history of the "Nigerian prince" or "419" scam, a scam that has its roots before email was around.

Transactional emails have an average open rate of around 50%, according to metrics from MarketingSherpa. In an opinion piece on MarketingLand.com, Chris Hexton, co-founder of email services company Vero, points out that newsletters only have a 20% open rate, making transactional emails 100% more effective than newsletters on average.

Two months after being acquired by Dropbox, Mailbox is releasing its iPad app. The company has been working on the app for years but it is finally ready to come out of beta. The app helps users manage and organize their email. It is designed to work well for both quick email management like when a user is quickly flipping through emails, as well as for when a user wants to sit down and respond to an email and may have a keyboard hooked up to their iPad.

ExactTarget has plans to expand its office in Atlanta and will invest $1.25 million in its expansion effort over five years, adding 225 new jobs to the area. Last October, ExactTarget acquired B-to-B software provider Pardot and will move into the company's existing office in the Atlanta area.

Although face-to-face sessions are ideal, email has shown itself to be a viable alternative for medical professionals treating patients with Cognitive behavioral therapy for anxiety related disorders. Nazanin Alavi, MD, of Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, presented her findings at the American Psychiatric Association's annual meeting this week, explaining that in a 6-month trial involving 62 patients, those receiving treatment by email showed significant reductions in anxiety compared to those people receiving no therapy.

Tempo, an iOS calendar organizing app has released a new update that makes it easier for users to sync their calendar with their Gmail account. Tempo users can now invite attendees to meetings and share events with their contacts using the Gmail app for iOS instead of the native Mail client app on the device. Tempo takes details from a user's social media or email messages to add important details to calendar listings such as driving directions.

To promote its new Xbox One gaming console, Microsoft ran an email marketing offer today. Customers who signed-up for a preorder email notification on the Xbox One, would get a $10 Microsoft Store credit. The coupon giveaway is over now since too many people tried to abuse the the offer by implementing scrips, but Microsoft is still using the launch to collect email addresses.