Banning email in the workplace has been a provocative idea among executives who say that the employees at their companies waste too much time responding to emails. The availability of enterprise level social sharing tools and the deluge of email has prompted "no email" policies at some businesses. But this idea is just a fad that will be short-lived, according to Gartner's latest Hype Cycle for social software report. Gartner analyst Jeffrey Mann writes in the report, "Although the concept of no-email is provocative and attractive on many levels, a narrow focus on eliminating the use of this one tool …

Digital scrapbooking site Pinterest has patched up a hole in its design code that, if left open, would have exposed the names and email addresses of the social networks' more than 70 million users. security Researcher Dan Melamed pointed out that the back end flaw could have allowed a hacker to set up a bot which could have pulled the site's list of email addresses which could become the victims of malicious emails.

Texas-based software security firm Globalscape has upgraded its Mail Express email platform allowing users to send unlimited sized files on demand using Microsoft Outlook or a web browser. The enhancement is supposed to help users avoid having to use workarounds when sharing large files which could risk the privacy of enterprise business data. "When the typical user tries to send large files via the approved means and encounters errors, they often revert to workarounds that are fraught with security and privacy issues that ultimately put the business at risk," Doug Conyers Sr., VP of engineering at Globalscape, told San Antonio …

NYTimes.com was temporarily shut down on Tuesday after hackers gained access to the user name and password of one of the company's sales partners and then used the credentials to manipulate internal data that directs the news site to load. The hackers gained the login information from a phishing email sent to Melbourne IT employees, a NY Times partner, that were duped into sharing.

Inbox management tool SaneBox is all about organizing a user's inbox by their relationship to the user. The goal of the plaform is to minimize the work of the user and cut down on inbox overload, explained SaneBox vice president of growth Dmitri Leonov in an interview with PC Magazine. "The real problem with email overload is not that email is broken. It's that we're doing more work in faster cycles with more people," he explained. The tool prioritizes emails from people that users send and receive from a lot. The company is also working on a new feature that …

Forty-six percent of American workers don't open email while they are on vacation which is down from 59 percent in 2005, according to a new report from Fox News. Forty-two percent of workers check their email while taking time off from work. Twenty-four percent of those with a job check in at least once a day including 13 percent who check their email several times a day. Eighteen percent check it a few times a week. The also report revealed that moms are more likely to check emails on break than dads, and those people under 35 years old are …

Business travel management company Egencia had a very messy email database back in 2009. So the following year they decided to team up with email services provider Marketo to do something about it. Together, they began executing the 'Awaken' campaign, a quarterly initiative designed to improve the quality and flexibility of their list. The campaign involved sending contacts requests to complete forms to make sure that their email addresses were up to date. Subscribers were given incentives to do so. The company is using this updated profile data to send more personalized communications to its 434,000 contacts, as well as …

Voice recognition software developer Nuance has sent an email marketing messages to users hinting that Apple's iOS 7 will arrive on September 10th. The company may have an inside tip or may just be responding to the widely circulated rumors that the new operating system and the new iPhone will be announced that day. The email encourages developers to test their Nuance speech services to make sure that the tool works when the upgrade goes live.

German email providers are seeing a spike in users as email users are looking outside of the United States for private email alternatives. Telecom firm Freenet has seen an 80% increase in new users in the last three weeks, and the web hosting company 1&1 has reported a six-figure increase in customers for its email providers GMX and web.de

MyKolab, a privacy-centric email platform that lets users merge their email, task lists and calendar data in an encrypted format, has introduced a 'lite' version of its platform. The existing platform is pretty robust, but this new free version is available for webmail only. The product launch was inspired by the shuttering of the tech blog Groklaw. "After Groklaw's shutdown, the attention for MyKolab was overwhelming," explained Kolab Systems CEO Georg Greve, on the company's site. "We reacted as fast as we could to meet the demand and to make real email privacy affordable for almost everyone."