NYC mayor Michael Bloomberg has a private email handle that he and and an unnamed deputy mayor reportedly both use to avoid having their conversations become public record. According to reports both use @bloomberg.net email addresses to evade public records. The news comes as EPA officials were let off the hook yesterday for using personal emails to avoid becoming part of the public record.

On his way out the door as a Reuters correspondent, Europe-based senior correspondent Martin de Sa'Pinto sent an email dissing 10 editors and executives at the company by giving them condescending secret nicknames. He circulated the email to 1,400 employees at the news agency offering to buying his former colleagues a drink if they could identify the people behind the names. The names include: The Magic Herring; Turtle Neck; Armytage; Chubba the Hut; The Lying Dutchman; and The Eagle has Pharted.

Silicon Valley judge Lucy Koh is going to make Google go to court to defend its practice of scanning emails. The company is being accused by users of illegally wiretapping by scanning the data of Gmail in order to serve relevant ads. Koh denied Google's defense which claimed that this scanning practice is part of the business operations of offering free email. "In fact, Google's alleged interception of e-mail content is primarily used to create user profiles and to provide targeted advertising - neither of which is related to the transmission of e-mails," she wrote in last week's ruling.

Apple is now allowed to deliver push email communications to German customers that use iOS devices. The functionality was banned for the last year and a half after Motorola won a patent suit against. According to reports, Apple is now allowed to offer push because a German court of appeals has temporarily stayed Motorola's injunction.

Advertising technology company TellApart has acquired email marketing startup company AdStack for what is reportedly "in the single-digit millions." The acquisition brings email targeting, A/B testing and personalization to TellApart. TellApart has the money to expand its offerings. The company has raised $17.75 million over three rounds of funding.

A malicious piece of software that was designed to launch password guessing attacks against websites built with WordPress and Joomla is now being used to attack email and FTP servers. This "Fort Disco" spam was identified by researchers in August after it infected more than 25,000 Windows computers and tried to guess administrator account passwords on more than 6,000 WordPress, Joomla and Datalife Engine websites. Swiss security researcher identified the malware again this week in a number of attacks on POP3, a tool that allows email clients to connect to servers.

EPA employees did not receive sufficient training or guidance from the organization on how to handle emails, according to an inspector general's report released Monday. The report blames the agency not the former officials for using private email accounts to conduct official business. Investigators spoke with top-level employees and determined that these people were not set out to dupe the public.

Yahoo has paid out a $12.50 bounty fee to security researchers that found bugs that were designed to compromise any @yahoo.com email accounts. Yahoo awarded the minuscule sum to Swiss security firm High-Tech Bridge in the form of a voucher that could be spent in the Yahoo company store. High-Tech Bridge released a statement explaining that it set out to test the efficacy of bug bounties by seeing if it could find a flaw on within Yahoo's system. It took them 45 minutes to do so. Yahoo rejected the request explaining via email that the bug was already known and …