Democratic Senator Mark Udall from Colorado said that he is "extremely concerned" over revelations that the FBI reads citizens' emails without a warrant despite the fact that a federal appeals court ruled this action as unconstitutional. Udall's comments come in response to new documents shared this week by the ACLU which revealed that the FBI and believes it can access emails without a warrant if the email was sent or received through a third-party service.

Think email is dead? Think again. RebelMouse, a state of the art new media tool which pulls content from from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Google+ into a custom social front page online, is using email to engage its users. The company works with MailChimp to send out daily email newsletters. "As much as we're told e-mail isn't sexy, no one sends more e-mail than Facebook or Twitter," Paul Berry, the CEO of RebelMouse told Wired.

Brennan Carlson, SVP of products and strategy at Lyris, has outlined six different factors that he thinks email marketers need to be thinking about when considering the future of email. One of those is that email will become a location-based marketing channel. "For example, by creating check-in programs, promoted via email, it presents the opportunity to cross-promote other goods and services based on where the subscriber is located," he writes in an opinion piece in Direct Marketing News.

Emails with social icons have a higher average click through rate than emails without them, according to new metrics from email marketing services company GetResponse. According to the report, emails without social buttons have an average 2.4% click through rate but those with social sharing capabilities have an average 6.2% click through rate. According to the report, in 2012, 29.4% of email marketers included social sharing icons in their emails, up from 18.3% in 2011 (a 61% increase).

In an opinion piece about the importance of using responsive design in email, Mark Ash, Media Director at Teradata eCircle, revealed that 92% of the emails sent by the top 50 retailers in the UK are optimized for mobile optimized. However, these retailers aren't taking full advantage of their options, as only 43% of them have introduced a mobile website.

Movable Ink, an email services company that lets senders , make real-time updates to emails that have already been sent, has raised $11 million in venture capital in a Series B funding round led by Intel Capital. The company, whose clients include Starbucks, American Eagle Outfitters and Barclays, has raised $12.3 million to date.

The American Civil Liberties Union have published documents on Wednesday that reveal that the FBI and some U.S. Attorney's offices have justified the practice of reading citizens' private emails without a warrant. To assert this power, the government is relying on the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986, which allows the government to read emails without a warrant. The law is currently being revised.

Florida-based retailer Palm Beach Jewelry has found that buying email lists is a great way to find new customers. The retailer has gained at least 100 new customers for every 10,000 e-mail addresses that it rents from other web sites. Working with email vendor eWayDirect Inc., Palm Beach Jewelry segments these lists and only sends to populations that are more likely to buy.

In a move to keep their streets cleaner and help make garbage pick up more effective, some cities are testing public trash cans that will email the garbage collectors when they are full and need to be picked up. The trash cans are called Big Belly and they come with a built-in trash compactor. They cost $7,000 each.

Minnesota Representative Michele Bachmann is trying to settle a lawsuit claiming that during her 2012 presidential campaign members of her team stole an email list from an Iowa campaign staffer. According to reports, Bachmann went to Iowa on Monday to meet with attorneys for the Iowa staffer Barb Heki.