Monetate has introduced a new email marketing tool that is designed to help send automated offers based on what they might be experience in the present moment, such as offers for umbrellas during a rainstorm. The Monetate Email service price will be based on the amount of traffic that a merchant has to their e-commerce site and what other Monetate products the retailer is selling.

Cloud marketing platform provider Emailvision has changed its name to SmartFocus. The new name was chosen to help represent the company's growing multichannel marketing automation tools. The company has been selling these new services for some time now, and their name felt old SmartFocus CEO Brad Wilson told Direct Marketing News. The company, which is better known in Europe than in the U.S., is pushing to expand their business in North America.

Last night Seymour Stein, the man who discovered Madonna, received the first ever CBGB Icon Award. Rather than show up to celebrate with Stein, Madonna sent an email. Mandy Stein, Seymour's daughter and the director a documentary on CBGB's called 'Burning Down the House,' read Madonna's email tribute to Stein at the event in New York.

The Chicago Transit Agency has rolled out a new Ventra transit card, and used email to distribute the access codes to hundreds of thousands of customers. Unfortunately, the email went out weeks before the transit cards arrived in the mail and many customers either deleted the email or never got it. The whole mixup is flooding the organization's call centers.

The Better Business Bureau is warning eBay sellers about the risks of spoofing. eBay sellers are at risk of having their email addresses spoofed, says the BBB. The organization is warning sellers about requests from shoppers who say they need something as soon as possible, which are followed by PayPal emails saying that a transaction has gone through. "It turns out that's not a real email from PayPal at all," Leah Napoliello from the Houston BBB.

Australian technology firm Fastmail promises to deliver secure email sending services. The company claims to be NSA-proof. The company asserts that it "does not co-operate with blanket surveillance" and does not give information on its users to anyone outside Australia. This assertion comes after a movement of NSA-proof email programs have been popping up in Germany.

U.S. Rep. Darrell Issa has accused top IRS officials of allegedly using private email to regularly conduct official business, including sending classified documents to non-agency email addresses. Issa, a California Republican and chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, explained his accusations in a letter addressed to IRS Acting Commissioner Daniel Werfel. The news comes a couple of weeks after EPA officials were let off the hook for using private emails to conduct official business.

Google's Gmail incorrectly flagged a message from Adobe to its customers as spam. Last week Adobe was hacked into and some customer information was compromised. Adobe sent an email to customers explaining the issue and encouraging customers to reset their passwords. Unfortunately for Gmail users, these emails landed in the spam trap.

British novelist Jon McGregor has taken this year off from email in order to get some work done. The author explained his decision and his current modus operandi in a piece in The Guardian. In the article he explains that in order to focus on writing, he has quit email for the entire year. He has set his out of the office reply explaining this protocol and instructing people to get in touch with him through his agent or by sending him a letter."I've enjoyed rediscovering letter writing, and will continue to work my way through the stamps and envelopes," …

PureVPN, a service that allows users to assign new IP addresses to their devices do that they can use the Internet in restricted countries, has been the victim of a phishing campaign. Fake emails claiming to be from PureVPN claiming that the user's data was compromised and that their account was being closed. Uzair Gadit, the founder of the VPN tunneling service, told TechCrunch that these emails did not come from PureVPN and that there is nothing wrong with the company's service.