The private email addresses and phone numbers of 6 million Facebook users were exposed to users that downloaded their account histories onto their own computers. According to Facebook, the issue allowed "some of a person's contact information (email or phone number) to be accessed by people who either had some contact information about that person or some connection to them."

Video in email has yet to be widely adopted but 25% of marketing executives have combined the marketing campaigns, and have increased response rates because of it, according to a new report from The Relevancy Group and StreamSend. The study revealed that marketers using video in email generated 40% higher monthly revenue than those that did not. In addition, 55% of marketers that use video in email said they had increased click-through rates, and 24% reported increase conversion rates.

Athletic shoes retailer The Finish Line discovered that by targeting emails by location during its March Final Four promotions, they could increase response rates significantly. Working with technology provider Movable Ink, The Finish Line targeted customers by location and looked at which of the Final Four colleges a customer was closest to. When the customer opened their email, it was loaded with images and products specific to the school in their area. As a result, the company increased its click through rates by 80% this year as compared to last year.

Scentiments.com has found that reminding Scentury Club loyalty members that their points are about to expire through email can double average order values. These loyalty members usually spend 15% more per order than non-members anyway. So the retailer has begun emailing these members before their points expire to remind them to use them up. These emails generate a 30% higher average order value than emails sent to non-members. In addition, these reminder emails to loyalty members had a 106% increase in revenue per email, drove email opens up 139%, and click-throughs up 97%, and conversion rates up 25%.

Yesterday Facebook announced video capabilities for Instagram and Twitter responded by sending out an email promoting its own video service Vine. Vine has been a popular tool since it launched, but the new Instagram video lets users take longer videos and has more editing capabilities. Twitter users tweeted about getting the email from Twitter and the general sentiment among users was that the email seemed defensive.

Yahoo has defended its upcoming program that will let new users reclaim the names of inactive email addresses after the program has come under fire. The company released a statement on Tumblr claiming that they have taken a number of security measures to insure the data and security from past users. Critics of the program have pointed out that the program opens up the doors for potential identify theft, fraud and spam.

Washington State University's Information Services is changing the way that email is sent through its platform. The university is making the change in order to improve its email reputation and remove itself from blacklists. The university has ended up on a number of blacklists by various Internet domains including Yahoo and Comcast, after spammers gained access to some WSU email accounts and used them to send malicious content through WSU servers.

Microsoft's Outlook.com is experiencing a glitch that is making some emails go missing. The issue began in January and was fixed but appears to have returned, as consumers are complaining about the issue on Microsoft forums. The timing couldn't be worse since Microsoft recently migrated its entire Hotmail userbase to Outlook.com.

David Workman, e-commerce operations manager for Delta Apparel Inc., the company that operates SaltLife.com and Soffe.com, told Internet Retailer that it's time to start planning for holiday emails. "You have to start planning right now, like, literally, this week," he said. Over the past couple of holiday seasons, Workman has learned that personalized emails perform better than discounts. Workman said that "conversions went through the roof" in 2012 when they dropped their 2011 10% off offer and switched to sending more targeted and relevant emails.

Smartphone users check their email on their phones six times a day on average, and 61% of these people use their smartphones to make purchases, according to Google. Despite this fact, according to dotMailer, only 23% of online retailers optimized their emails to fit smartphone screens. However, 84% of these marketers do link their emails to mobile landing pages which are designed to render well on smartphones.