Oracle has agreed to acquire email marketing services company Responsys for $1.5 billion. The Responsys acquisition is the seventh for Oracle this year. The deal follows other major acquisitions in the email marketing space. ExactTarget was snapped up by Salesforce earlier this year.

Email open rates fell 12.8 percent on Black Friday and dropped 7.5 percent on Cyber Monday among consumers using Gmail, according to a new report from Sailthru. The other consumer email services including Yahoo, AOL and Hotmail saw an average 5.2 percent increase in open rates on Black Friday and a 17.5 hike on Cyber Monday. This report suggests that Gmail's "Promotions" tab could be hurting consumer engagement with email marketing.

Security researchers have identified a new form of Android spam which pretends to be a Google app and then uses this disguise to collect the email addresses and mobile phone numbers of consumers. The threat, which has been nicknamed MisoSMS, is coming from Chinese cybercriminals. The malware tried to get consumers to click on a link that takes them to the app. The app appears to be an Android settings app but if it is installed, it will steal data from the consumer's phone.

A Canadian medical clinic called Medcan accidentally leaked its email list when it mailed its holiday email card. The email went out to thousands of current and prospective corporate clients. Attached to the email was a spreadsheet with the clinic's email list. The clinic send the email with the emails to 370 corporate clients on Sunday.

Target reported that the personal data of its more than 40 million customers have been compromised. The retailer said that customers' names, email addresses, passwords, and even worse, their credit card accounts, have been exposed. The hackers gained access sometime between Black Friday weekend and December 15th.

Email volume was up 12.7 percent in Q3, as compared to last year, according to Experian Marketing Services. Interestingly, the report revealed that unique open rates rose 6 percent. In addition, the study also revealed that unique click rates for shipping confirmations went up 13.5 percent if the email was personalized. Unique click rates for shipping confirmations without personalization only went up 8.3 percent. Another tidbit from the study, emails inviting consumers to join loyalty programs that were sent with order or shipping confirmations saw click through rates go up 26 percent.

News aggregation iOS app Flipboard has released its latest update which allows users to send links to individual articles in the app to other Flipboard users via email. The email messages will show up to recipients as an email with a link under a "Shared With You" section in the notifications section of the app. Prior to this release, users could only share articles to their social networks.

Rather than responding to an email from an angry customer, Uber CEO Travis Kalanick posted it on his Facebook page and tried to play it off as entertainment by telling readers to "get some popcorn and scroll down." The email came from a loyal customer who was upset that he was charged $180 to take an Uber car service 60 blocks during a snowstorm. Kalanick responded with a long email explaining how Uber's free market pricing works.

National Archives and Records Administration has just completed a major email transfer. The government agency almost 8 terabytes of email data to a cloud-based messaging and collaboration system in six months. The move required transferring the email accounts of about 5,000 employees. Prior to the move, the organization was working with a 15 year-old client email system. Now the company working with Google Apps for Government, Exchange My Mail and ZL Technologies' United Archive.

Only 21 percent of retailers sent abandoned shopping cart emails within 3 days of Cyber Monday, according to a new report from ExactTarget. The company browsed the sites of more than 90 retailers, added items to their carts and then waited for follow up. Of those follow up emails, only half came within 24 hours of shopping cart abandonment, which is when a consumer is likely to make a purchase.