Holiday-themed emails pretending to be from Costco or Walmart are taking advantage of consumers this holiday season. The emails pretend to address a cancelled order due to an address error. Recipients that click on the link will trigger a download that will turn their computes into bots. The emails are identifiable with a close look as the logos are slighting wrong.

David Morken, Co-founder and CEO of Bandwidth, a company that focuses on IP-based communications, has a strict email policy for employees. If you are on vacation, you are not allowed to email about work. Period. In an interview with Forbes, Morken revealed the company's email policy, revealing the rule "you may not communicate with the company and they may not communicate with you." The idea is that employees need to recharge during their time off and shouldn't work while on vacation, so that they will be more productive when they return to work.

Israeli officials are urging the U.S. government to stop spying on the emails sent by the Israeli government. The action came as a reaction to recent documents leaked by NSA contractor Edward Snowden that revealed the NSA's specific targets. As part of their message, the Israeli government is calling the U.S. to release Jonathan Pollard, a former American intelligence analyst who is serving time in the U.S. for spying on behalf of Israel.

Good news for AOL iCloud users. Despite previously announced plans to stop supporting iCloud email accounts through its Alto webmail service, AOL has changed its mind. The company's Alto division emailed users about the change and apologized for any confusion this decision may have caused. In the email, Alto promised not to drop iCloud email in the future either.

Voice-controlled email app Talkler has a new update that lets users download entire messages no matter how long they are. In addition, the app update allows the tool to faster process natural speech of downloaded emails from IMAP servers. It also makes it easier to dictate commands after the app has read you the email with a brief period of silence at the end of the message, before Talkler's AutoPilot move on to the next email.

Doctors asking patients for their email addresses has raised eyebrows among some consumers. While doctors advocate that email is an efficient way to communicate with patients, some patients distrust the idea of discussing their health issues over email for fear that their private information will somehow be leaked. Still doctors say that consumers are used to trusting companies with credit card information online and should be open to having conversations with doctors over email, as it can make communications more efficient for doctor's offices.

There are plenty of new tools available for consumers to help create disposable email addresses. Sites including Air Mail, Melt Mail, Easy Trash Mail, Trash Mail and Fake Inbox offer consumers the ability to create fake email accounts in order to gain access to content on websites without really having to share their real personal details.

The brand perception of Yahoo among consumers is down after the company's email platform went out last week. The company's buzz dropped to a 6 out of a possible -100 to +100, according to its BrandIndex Buzz score. However the company's BrandIndex Buzz score for Yahoo didn't move when it came to Quality and Satisfaction. Those metrics did not move, despite the outage.

A number of law firms are investigating the Board of Directors of Responsys to see if there were breaches of responsibility related to Oracle's acquisition of the company. The investigation will look into possible violations of state laws in connection with the sale. Oracle reported today that it plans to buy Responsys for $1.5 billion.

Retailers saw a 22.8 percent increase in email volume in Q3 2013, as compared to the same quarter in 2012, according to a new report from Monetate. The report also revealed that revenue stemming from emails dropped 17.7 percent during the quarter. Email accounted for 2.92 percent of traffic to retail sites during the quarter, down from 4.03 percent the previous year, the report concluded.