The British Broadcasting Corporation has warned its staff that its email network has been compromised. The broadcaster cautioned of a potential spam attack coming from the broadcaster's email network after hackers sympathetic to Syrian President Bashar Assad illegally accessed the network. Assad supporters then hacked into a couple of BBC Twitter accounts to post political messages.

Yahoo's email system was hacked into this month compromising the accounts of many Yahoo email users. The hackers, which are likely based in Russia, used the accounts of legitimate Yahoo email users to send spam messages. The March breach came after Yahoo's email accounts were hacked into in January, and Yahoo claimed to have fixed the problem. Apparently the suspicious log-ins came from mobile phones in various locations around the world. The FBI is investigating the hack.

Security software company AVG Technologies has introduced a new email security service through its latest CloudCare, cloud-based administration platform, bringing added email security services to the small-to-medium-sized businesses marketplace. AVG's CloudCare platform now includes spam blocking software to prevent spam, viruses, phishing attacks, malware, and denial of service (DoS) attacks. In addition, the update includes a new email archive feature that lets small businesses search, archive and recover emails.

Design is an important element when creating an email marketing campaign. To help marketers get the right person for the job, Chris Studabaker, gobal practice manager of design solutions at ExactTarget, has outlined some tips for hiring an email designer. He argues that marketers need to look at a number of factors when hiring a designer, including their web design experience, their ability to code, their knowledge of direct marketing, their understanding of analytics and their artistic relevance.

Illinois state representative Lou Lang claims that he has been getting a number of "canned" emails from AARP members who are opposed to legislation that he is sponsoring. He has asked the seniors organization to share the actual email addresses of these members, so that he can reply to them. According to Lang, the messages were sent through no-reply emails and he is unable to respond to the citizens' concerns.

Email marketing is expected to pick up in India, according to a new report from the Indian digital marketing company Octane.in. According to the survey, which includes feedback from 500 marketers from 412 companies, email marketing takes second place in when it comes to what channels Indian marketers will be investing in this year. (Social media took first place). In addition, 99 percent of the respondents said that their email marketing programs were effective in meeting their goals last year.

If email were invented today, it might operate in a fundamentally different ways, says Nathaniel Borenstein, chief scientist at the email company Mimecast. He explains to ZDNet that email communications are based on open standards that can be sent from one system to another, say Gmail to Yahoo Mail. He said that if the same type of program were invented today it might be a closed system, the way that social networks operate. For instance, if you are communicating on Facebook you can't directly message someone on Google+.

The media blog Gawker published George W. Bush's email address and encouraged its readers to send the former president a message on the 10th anniversary of the Iraq War. Gawker obtained the email address from a Bush family email correspondence that a hacker group published online last month.

GitHub Enterprise, an online code-sharing platform for developers, has leaked more than 3,000 emails of customers that use its service. Those emails were then posted online. The email told recipients that their licenses were running out and called them to link to a GitHub page to renew their deals. The company has not yet explained the mishap.

At 1am this morning, MIT students and faculty members received an email purporting to be from the university's president L. Rafael Reif. In the email it appeared that Reif had cancelled all classes today. The email was was a hoax and was not sent by Reif, but was sent by someone pretending to be him. The Institute has said that classes are scheduled as usual today.