Yahoo's two-day email outage is entering into day 3 for some users. Jeffrey Bonforte, the senior vice president of communication products at Yahoo, admitted the issues on Tumblr. "The issue has been harder to fix than we originally expected," he wrote. "We have dozens of people working around the clock to bring it to a resolution."

The National Technical Assistance Centre (NTAC), a division of GCHQ in the UK, has forced secure email company PrivateSky to shut down its service. The government agency wanted access to user data and the threatened the company with jail time if they did not comply. So they shut down the service and it is now only available for the company internally.

Disqus, the commenting platform used by many media outlets, has come into the spotlight after a group of journalists broke into its platform to expose the offensive comments of politicians and other public figures for on right-wing websites. The Swedish newspaper Expressen in conjunction with an investigative journalism group allegedly revealed the identity of hundreds of people who left these comments through their email addresses. Disqus says that their site had not been breached, but blamed the journalists for abusing a feature it used for a third-party service.

Yahoo Mail has been down for the last day or so, according to reports. According to Twitter users and tips to TechCrunch, the consumer email service has been serving consumers with "scheduled maintenance" messages when they go to log in. Yesterday, Yahoo's Customer Care Twitter account confirmed the partial outage saying that it should be fixed, but there are still issues. Yahoo advises users to try their email on a smartphone or tablet which aren't experiencing the issues.

Microsoft created a tool that lets Outlook.com users to import Gmail messages,in a move to steal some of Google's business. The addition of IMAP support for Outlook.com allows consumers to easily switch from Gmail to Outlook without losing their past emails and contacts. Now users can import their entire emails accounts, including labels and structures, into Outlook.com.

Google has updated Gmail and has begun caching images, which could cause issues for email marketing companies. The new approach will keep marketers from knowing the location of the users, since the cache will hide the IP address of the user. In addition, it can hurt cookie retargeting and timing on dynamically targeted content. In addition, it can create an issue for open rates, as images cached will only be downloaded once per recipient at best.

Karen 'Gary' Kazaryan has been convicted of hacking into the email accounts and then blackmailing them into sharing sexually-suggestive photos of themselves with him. According to the case, Kazaryan victimized 350 women. The judge sentenced him to five years.

Security experts are warning about a trove of phishing emails that are going around pretending to be from PayPal. The emails, which are spam messages, ask users to share their account log-in details. If consumers click on the links and share information they are at risk of having their personal information stolen, as well as having their account spoofed.

The Australian Federal Police has plans to adopt a new technology that is capable of collecting and storing emails in real time. The organization has plans to test this "deep packet inspection" (DPI) technology in February and then widely roll it out in April. The technology can serve as a firewall and collect information about email subject headers and message content. The U.S. has used the same kind of technology.

Ninety percent of commercial emails delivered to Gmail accounts are ending up in the "promotions" tab, according to a recent report from Return Path. Only 0.3 percent go into the wide tab. This isn't necessarily a bad thing. According to the report Gmail users actively check their "promotions" tab for emails and open rates haven't changed much.