Miranda July's "We Think Alone" email art project, a 20 week initiative in which she sends a collection of previously sent emails from celebrities to viewers that have opt-in, kicked off this week. The first email went out yesterday and it focused on money. The email revealed that Kirsten Dunst sold her used car to her friend and that Lena Dunham was not willing to spend $24,035.24 on a sofa, among many other things. The weekly series will continue through November and readers can opt-in to receive the communications at any time through out the project.

Wondering which words to use in your subject line? Adestra has published a new report called that analyzes the subject lines of emails and reveals the best and worst words to use to get a customer to open an email. Not surprisingly, 'Sale' is a popular term and it garners on average a 23.2% open rate. It's a better choice than 'Save' which has a much lower open rate average of 3.4%. Regardless of which words marketers choose, testing is always the best way to optimize a campaign.

RSS Components, an e-commerce company that sells industrial components recently implements an abandoned shopping cart email program and has seen a 7% increase in conversions driven by these emails. The emails are sent to customers who have visited the site and have added items to their cart but did not check out. These emails are sent within 24 hours. More specifically, the company only sends these emails to customers who have not purchased anything in the two days prior to receiving the email and to customer's that have not received an email within 15 days.

The day and time that a marketer sends an email can have a big influence on the response rate. And a new report from Experian has found that the best time and day to send varies by country. For instance, shoppers in the U.S. are more likely to respond to an email sent on the weekend, while shoppers in France and India are more responsive to emails sent during the week.

Deutsche Post has acquired optivo, a German email marketing service provider optivo, in a deal whose terms were not disclosed. The acquisition expands Deutsche Post's marketing toolset. The company, which is one of the largest courier companies in the world, also offers direct mail and mobile marketing services.

New leaked PRISM slides have revealed that the NSA can track real-time digital activity such as email logins or the sending of email, as well as when a user logs in or out of a chat service. These new slides also suggest that the government had installed hardware on-site at technology companies, casting doubt on denials from major Internet companies who claim that they only provided private user data when required by a judge.

Online retailers have quadrupled their customer acquisition via email over the past four years, according to a new report from marketing data company Custora. The report analyzed data from 72 million customers shopping on 86 different retailer sites and tracked which channels customers were clicking from to e-commerce sites. While email proved to be a strong acquisition channel, Facebook barely drove any sales and Twitter drove none. According to the report, organic search was the most popular channel for driving sales.