Online payments company Square has introduced a new platform whereby users can send cash via email. It's called Square Cash. To use it a consumer doesn't have to join or sign in. They simply compose an email, copy a Square email address and include the dollar amount in the subject line.

Princeton's Ed Felten has defended Lavabit's right to resist court orders. "At Lavabit, an employee, on receiving a court order, copies user data and gives it to an outside party-in this case, the government," he wrote in a blog post. "Meanwhile, over at Guavabit, an employee, on receiving a bribe or extortion threat from a drug cartel, copies user data and gives it to an outside party-in this case, the drug cartel. From a purely technological standpoint, these two scenarios are exactly the same." Lavabit shut down in August after receiving pressure from the government to share information about its …

Only 25 percent of marketers are sending follow up emails to online shoppers who have abandoned their shopping carts, according to a new report from email services provider Listrak. In research conducted from June through August on the marketing practices of e-commerce sites in the Top 1000, Listrak found that the Top 1000 retailers only had email addresses for 29 percent of the shoppers who abandoned their sites. To address the issue 19.8 percent of email marketers use popups to try to collect these email addresses. Among that group of retailers, 41 percent sent at least remarketing email to a …

Behavioral analysis company Embarke has raised $1.25 million in seed money to help grow its email business. The company is focused on looking at behavioral analysis and advanced segmentation in order to drive email open rates and clickthrough performance. The financing came through venture capital led by Social Leverage with participation from Promus Ventures, Anthem Ventures, Right Side Capital Management, and individual angeles. The San Diego-based company recently launched a distribution partnership with email provider SendGrid.

Yahoo will enable encryption tools for users that log into Yahoo Mail beginning January 8th. "Yahoo takes the security of our users very seriously,"explained the company in a statement. Yahoo first introduced SSL encryption standard earlier this year. The tool encrypts mail as it moves between the browser and Yahoo's servers. Beginning next year, the feature will automatically be turned on for all Yahoo Mail users.

The National Security Agency is tapping the personal contacts of email users around the globe, according to new documents released by whistleblower Edward Snowden. According to the latest revelations, the NSA intercepts email address books and IM users' 'buddy lists' to keep track of the relationships between email users.

Last week Yahoo revealed a new look for Yahoo Mail, but the redesign is chock full of problems. Some users have had email addresses disappear from their contacts lists as well as sent messages erased from folders. Many users don't like the new Mail Tabs folder that sorts messages by sender or subject options. The Print button is also gone from the new mailbox, leaving some users up in arms.

The Brazilian government is dropping Microsoft as its email provider in a move to keep its communications private and out of the hands of spying members of the NSA. President Dilma Rousseff tweeted the news yesterday. "I have mandated the deployment of a secure email system throughout the federal government," she wrote. The Brazilian data processing body Serpro will decommission the Microsoft Outlook platform that the organization is currently using.

Air Canada's media relations is in hot water after the team accidentally emailed the wrong message to the press. CBS TV in San Francisco contacted the airline about claims that the airline's handlers lost a dog at SFO on Monday after his flight was delayed. Air Canada claims that the dog ran away. The local news team inquired about the airline's procedures and received an email from Air Canada's spokesman Peter Fitzpatrick urging his colleagues to ignore the media request. "I think I would just ignore, it is local news doing a story on a lost dog. Their entire government …

Skimbox, a new iOS app, is trying to give consumers the ability to filter their own inboxes like Gmail's promotions tab. The free app uses inbox organizing features similar to Mailbox, but instead of working as a tool to triage email, the app is designed to intelligently surface the most relevant email messages.