Slate staff writer Will Oremus has raised an important question. Should email have a favorite button, so that you can like someone's email without having to send a response? He argues that it should. And that this button should be easy to use. Why? He points out that sometimes a conversation has been finalized but that if someone took the time to send you a funny email, you want to reply and acknowledge the message. But at the same time, you may not have the time to craft an equally witty response, and if you do, you may recreate a …

This week the Obama administration declassified hundreds of pages of documents related to the National Security Agency's controversial spying program. The release includes an 87-page ruling in which the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court first approved a program to track the emails of Americans during the Bush administration. The documents revealed that email metadata, but not the content, was scanned to search for associates of terrorist suspects. The program terminated in 2011.

About.com founder Scott Kurnit has come out with a new tool to help consumers manage their inboxes and unsubscribe to emails in bulk. The tool is called Swizzle. First the tool reads all of the emails in a user's inbox. Then it shows them a list of commercial emails from retailers Users are then given the option to unsubscribe to all of them at once or from any that they hand select. They can also choose to condense all the emails into a single daily digest.

After email encryption service Lavabit's founder shut his service down rather than turn over the encryption keys to the federal government, the government has ordered other secure webmail providers who have threatened to shut themselves down to stay open. Ladar Levison revealed this news during a recent Reddit AMA Q&A chat. "When I was deciding whether to shut down the decision really boiled down to whether users would prefer to have their emails secretly snooped, or simply lose their service altogether," he explained during the chat. "Since the court prevented me from telling anyone the situation, I had to make …

Yahoo announced plans to encrypt all user communications and other information that come in and out of the Internet company's data centers around the world. The announcement came on Monday from Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer. It came in response to a report in The Washington Post that the NSA has been spying on the data centers run by Yahoo and Google. Yahoo had already promised to encrypt its email service by January. This new announcement expands the commitment to include all online activities.

While consumer email usage is down, email is not dead and marketers are still finding that email is an effective marketing channel. According to McKinsey's iConsumer survey, consumer email usage suffered a 20 percent decline between 2008-2012, as other forms of communications took over. Still, 91 percent of all consumers still report using email every day. According to eMarketer, email conversion rates are at least 3x as high as social media conversion rates, and average order values are about 17 percent higher.

TinyLetter, an email delivery service owned by MailChimp, is designed to make emails feel more personal. Individuals and businesses alike can use the platform in a way that makes emails seem more like a letter. It is also easier to use. Fast Company explained it that TinyLetter is to MailChimp what Tumblr is to WordPress. It simplifies newsletters. Miranda July's We Think Alone, Rusty Foster's Today in Tabs and Alexis Madrigal's 5 Intriguing Things all use TinyLetter.

Despite orders from the Pentagon's chief information officer that all military services and Defense agencies come up with a plan to migrate their email systems to DoD's centralized enterprise email offering, the Navy and Marine Corps still won't commit to the move. The two organizations are expected to deliver plans by January 3rd, detailing how they will migrate their users to enterprise email by the first quarter of 2015. Both groups have long resisted cloud-based email systems claiming that they are more cost-effective.

Adobe's introduction of a flat-rate, profile-based email marketing tool with low prices could shake up the email marketing space, argues Forrester analyst Robert Brosnan in a piece published in Forbes. Adobe Campaign goes live as of January 1, 2014, and through this platform users can contract with Adobe to send unlimited emails. The move illustrates that Adobe is hoping to earn revenues into campaign management. According to Brosnan, aside from price, Adobe will also compete with structural advantages which include market penetration, preferred vendor status, and a large sales force.

Top officials involved in creating HealthCare.gov, the website for ObamaCare which has been experiencing widespread technical issues, may have known that the problems were coming. New emails have been released by Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee which show concerns for the functionality of the site. "I just need to feel more confident they are not going to crash the plane at take-off," wrote HealthCare.gov project manager Henry Chao, in an email sent on July 16th.