Gadget retailers in the UK upped their email volume to help drive Father's Day sales this past year, according to data culled from Return Path and analyzed by Fourth Source. The metrics look at the email marketing habits of 5 major UK gadget retailers leading up to the holiday and found that volume was up 50%. Despite this fact, the report found that emails sent at lower frequencies actually generated higher read rates and less spam complaints among these gadget shops. Emails that were sent with high frequency, as in a few times a week, had a 95 out of …

Consumers in France are getting the personal treatment in their inbox. According to Experian's latest global holiday email study, which looked at more than 100,000 campaigns from about a thousand brands in 10 countries from October-December 2012, 37.5% of marketing emails sent during this period in France were personalized. French marketers include gender, first name, child's name, and location, among other attributes to make emails more personal. France led the rest of the world with this approach. In China, 27% of the emails were personalized, in Spain 13.7% were, and in the U.S. only 9% of emails sent during the …

Cisco Systems is released a security update for its email, Web, and content security appliances. The updates address issues with vulnerabilities that attackers could use to hack into the current operating system. The update apply to a number of different Cisco platforms including: Cisco Content Security Management Appliance, the Cisco Email Security Appliance and the Cisco Web Security Appliance. The updates should prevent hackers from being able to inject and execute commands into the system remotely, and should prevent them from crashing the platform.

Three Atlanta-based AT&T employees have filed a patent for a system that would let email senders create self-destructing messages. The idea is to let senders of emails that have company secrets or proprietary information control how long those emails will live on so that they can prevent private information from living on servers or in inboxes after the message has been delivered. According to the proposal, a sender could delegate how long an email would last, prior to sending it. Once delivered the recipient would see information within the email about how long the message will last before it is …

As more details emerged about how the NSA's digital prying program worked, The Atlantic Wire broke down just how much information an average email can provide through its metadata. By looking at someone's email, the government would be able to see the sender's location based on their IP address, as well as the date and time that the message was sent. They can also see the names associated with the email addresses. According to The Guardian, the NSA's StellarWind project also allowed the collection and mining of information appearing on the 'to,' 'from' or 'bcc' lines. The program, which began …

Canadian consumers are more likely to buy something after receiving an email marketing message than they are to buy something after seeing a Facebook post or a sponsored tweet, according to a survey from ExactTarget. The report revealed that 93 percent of online Canadian consumers subscribe to at least one email marketing program. In addition, 44 percent of subscribers have made a purchase after receiving an email message. Only 24 percent of consumers made a purchase triggered by Facebook and even less, 5 percent, were driven to buy something after seeing an ad on Twitter. The report, which included feedback …

The National Security Agency was able to obtain the email records and internet usage of Americans in bulk, according to new documents obtained by The Guardian. These documents reveal that a federal judge who government a secret panel called the Fisa court approved requests to access a collection of Internet metadata from Americans, as well as people abroad. The judges approved these measures "every 90 days". This procedure was reportedly ended in 2011.

Author and filmmaker Miranda July has created a new art project that gives Internet users access to the private emails of famous people. Consumers can opt-in to receive weekly email updates from the project which will consist of email exchanges between celebrities chosen by July and the people in their lives. Participants include Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Lena Dunham and Kirsten Dunst. Every week will feature a new theme. The first week, the theme is money. The idea of the project, which is part of an exhibit called "We Think Alone," is to create digital self-portraits of these people based on what …

Tech startup Baydin has adapted its popular web based inbox management tool into an Android app called Boomerang for Android. The app will compete with other inbox management apps including Mailbox. Boomerang is designed for users to help manage their email responses and users have the option to archive, delete, snooze or "boomerang", label, mark as read and star messages.

Small-to-medium sized businesses are turning more regularly to the cloud for email services these days and if the growth rate continues as it has been, cloud-hosted options for email could overtake the percentage of those companies that use an on-premises email platform. This finding is part of new research from the IT professional community Spiceworks. The report, which included the survey responses of more than 500 small business people located around the globe, revealed that cloud hosted email mailings grew 4% to 46% of all emailings over the past year. And while cloud adoption is growing, on-premises email installations decreased …