Artist Ivan Cash has created an art project in which he turns emails into handwritten notes. The collaborative project, "Snail Mail My Email," just launched in its third installment. For the project, Cash and a group of hundreds of volunteers take donated emails and write them out as letters for 30 days. The project even landed a book deal in a past iteration.

Executives from Gilt Groupe and Rent The Runway have revealed that email no longer has the power that it once had. According to a report in Business Insider, Jennifer Fleiss, cofounder and president of Rent The Runway, told attendees at Business Insider's Ignition 2013 conference, "I think everyone would probably agree that email, even before the shift with Gmail, was becoming a less and less powerful channel."Gilt Groupe CEO Michelle Peluso revealed that Gmail tabs haven't affected revenues, but she did say that open rates are down.

The Navy has plans to do a major analysis of its current email platform and will look at the costs, security and performance of its current system before complying with an order from the Pentagon to use a Defense Department email system. Defense CIO Teri Takai designated the Defense Enterprise Email cloud service which is operated by the Defense Information Systems Agency as an enterprise service, instructing all defense agencies to develop a plan by January for shifting their email to the DISA cloud by October 2014.

Drivers are not just texting and driving while behind the wheel, they are also checking their email. According to a new report from State Farm, this behavior is on the rise in the U.S. In fact, from 2009 to 2013, the number of people surfing the Internet (which includes everything from checking email to Instagraming) went from 13% to 24%. This number is even higher among 18 to 29 year-olds, which went from 29% in 2009 to 49% in 2013.

The FBI is seeking a $10,000 fine from Ladar Levison, the owner of the email encryption service Lavabit, which was reportedly used by whistleblower Edward Snowden. The fine, a total of $5,000 a day for each day that he refused to aid the FBI and install monitors on his servers. Without his help, the FBI could not access any of the data on his servers. Levison waited two days before he handed over the keys, then shut down his business. He is currently appealing the fine.

Scammers are sending emails to executives pretending to be the CEO of their company in order to solicit personal details. These phishing emails look like they are coming from the boss, but they are not. "Someone will spoof an email to the CFO or controller and it will purport to be from the CEO," Christopher Novak, managing principal and security expert at Verizon Business told American Banker. "The email will say something like, we need to sponsor this event or pay this vendor, it's urgent and I need you to wire $100,000 into this account immediately, we're already 30 days …

Macy's, H&M, ASOS, Boohoo, Rue La La, House of Fraser, Schuh, Nordstrom, Mr Porter, American Apparel, Reiss and Office are among retailers that are not optimizing their emails for Android phones. eConsultancy's David Moth signed up for emails from these various brands in order to evaluate their welcome emails and has become surprised at the fact that they are not optimizing for mobile, at least not for Android.

Fifty-six percent of mobile online sales are driven by emails that are opened on the iPad, according to a new report from email marketing services provider Yesmail Interactive, an Infogroup company. The company examined more than 5 billion marketing emails sent by the company in the third quarter and cross referenced this against mobile data to come to this conclusion. More than 16 percent of sales driven by email were took place on a mobile device. Among these mobile purchases, 56 percent are happening on tablets and the remainder on smartphones. iPads dominated with more than 99 percent of tablet …

Edwin Vargas, a New York City police detective, has pleaded guilty to hacking into the email of at least one of his fellow NYPD officers. Vargas admitted to paying $4,000 for email hacking services that got him into at least one colleague's email account as well as his mobile phone. The Attorney General released a statement explaining that Vargas used PayPal to hire a criminal to illegally obtain the login details for at least 43 personal email accounts and one mobile phone.

Yahoo has updated its Yahoo Mail! platform and added a new multi-tasking function, called "Recent." The new function, which is available to all of Yahoo Mails's 300 million users, lets email users see their most recent activities with a tab feature which lets them multi-task by toggling between separate emails. It is a response to the removal of tabs. According to The New York Post, this new feature is not popular among users who just want tabs back.