Just hours before he died in a car accident, journalist Michael Hastings sent an email to friends and colleagues warning them to speak to an attorney if they were approached by federal authorities. "Perhaps if the authorities arrive 'BuzzFeed GQ', er HQ, may be wise to immediately request legal counsel before any conversations or interviews about our news-gathering practices or related journalism issues," he wrote in the email.

If you would like to get in touch with someone at a specific company, but don't have their email address, Rapportive can help. Rather than blindly mailing a number of potential email addresses, the tool helps you identify if a particular email address exists on a domain or not by its presence in social media.

Facebook revealed today that its privacy bug last week exposed the email addresses and phone numbers of six million users. In most cases these users only had their personal information exposed to one other person. The glitch exposed this information to Facebook users who downloaded their own information. The download contained the additional information about another user. Most of these exposed users were a friend of a friend -- the type of person that Facebook recommends users to add as a friend.

Google's new Gmail redesign is in effect and it means that marketing emails are now landing in subfolder in a user's inbox marked for promotions. Because the content is landing in these inboxes, consumers may be checking it less often and marketers should keep this in mind when running flash promotions or limited time sales. Kara Trivunovic, vice president of strategic services at email marketing firm BlueHornet Networks Inc. explained to Internet Retailer that retailers see most of their click through activity within three hours of delivery and this is likely to change if Gmail users aren't checking their promotional …

Email and authentication services came to a halt last week for two days for 135,000 email accounts used by the New South Wales Department of Education and Communities. While the organization would not confirm the cause, the word on the street is that the accounts were hacked. The university has confirmed that it is investigating the matter. While the institution began implementing Google services over the past few years, ZDNet points out that the affected email accounts were likely Microsoft Outlook.

North Dakota State University President Dean Bresciani has reported that his email was hacked into and more than 45,000 emails were deleted from his account. He revealed the news Tuesday by sending an email to NDSU students. Bresciani believes that the emails were deleted on or before April 29, though he is currently working with Microsoft and the university's legislative council to confirm this fact and to further investigate the issue.

Chicago activist Raynard Villa Hall has run an email newsletter to connect with his community since 2002. Since that time has has manually built up his list to include 22,000 email addresses and regularly sends mailings to these contacts by hand. But after being flagged as spam and sending to inactive email lists, Hall was kicked off of EarthLink. He has had to start over from scratch. To help avoid issues in the future, he has adopted an email service provider and has created an email signup page on his website and then users must verify their opt-in.

Google is turning 15 this year and spammers have taken advantage of this fact by sending a malicious email claiming to be from the online giant. The email claims that the recipient has won an award from "The Anniversary Centre of Google," a non-existent entity, which includes a hefty cash prize. Security blog Hoax-Slayer discovered the malicious content.

Half Price Books, Records, Magazines Inc. got a lot of love when the added social links to a recent email campaign. To promote its Book Lovers' Weekend event around Valentine's Day, the retailer sent two different promotional emails to its 1 million email subscribers and the messages encouraged recipients to share the offer, and included links to Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest. Within a week of the campaign, the company had 36,000 new email subscribers and more than 14,000 consumers redeemed one of the coupons in the company's stores.

Lighting retailer Lumens.com has found that frequency makes a big difference in keeping email subscribers. Working with AgilOne's Smart Email tool the company began testing different messaging frequency and noticed a 4% increase in open rates among enthusiastic subscribers and a 1.2% increase among its main subscribers within the first week. By cutting the frequency of emails that they send to their less enthusiastic customers, they have been able to decrease their unsubscribe rate among new subscribers by more than 50%.