Actress Fran Drescher is reportedly dating Shiva Ayyadurai, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduate who by some accounted invented "email." Ayyadurai has been credited as being the first person to hold the copyright for electronic mail, which he supposedly developed in 1978, though there are varying accounts of origins of email.

Marketo has released a new email marketing tool that is designed to help email marketers provide a more personalized email experience using automation. The tool is called Dialog Edition, and it helps marketers move from a more traditional campaign-based email marketing approach to an automated approach that sends personalized messages in real-time. The new software be available on Oct. 25.

Emails from government agencies to citizens were down more than four-fifths during the partial government shutdown, according to GovDelivery the company that manages email alerts for about half of federal agencies. The week before the shutdown, GovDelivery's platform systems sent more than 650,000 government emails to more than 66 million subscribers on behalf of 170 federal organizations. During the week of Oct. 6 when the shutdown was in effect, the company sent less than 1,200 emails to 17 million subscribers from less than 75 federal organizations.

Mobile messaging app Ping, a tool that turns emails into real-time conversations, has rebranded and its new name is hop. The name change comes after legal concerns were raised by PING Golf. The hop app has also been updated and optimized for iOS 7. The latest version bring about new features that mimic traditional email correspondence including the cc: and bb: fields.

Email sorting application Boxer has raised $3 million in a seed round lead by Sutter Hill Ventures. The app supports email clients including Yahoo, AOL and Gmail and integrates with Dropbox, Google Drive, Box, and Evernote. The company is hoping to expand into enterprise services.

When Lavabit owner Ladar Levison shut down his email encryption service back in August, he did so abruptly. This left some users locked out of their privatized communications. The company wants to help get users their data back. For a brief period this week, users can get a new SSL key and then on Friday at 7pm Central, users will be able to download an archive of their stored email messages.

In a move to prevent email users from overloading their inboxes, CargoLifter is offering a new service that lets email users automatically upload their email attachments to their favorite cloud-storage service. Rather than attach a large file to an email message, users can upload their file to their preferred cloud storage company. CargoLifer then provides a URL for downloading the file, for users to share in their email. The recipient can click on the link to download the file.

Slice, a mobile shopping app that leverages a consumer's email inbox as a source for commerce data, has released its first major update. The app, which already lets you offer the ability to track your order confirmations, shipments, online spending and price drops, has added a recall alerts. A few months ago the company received $23 million in Series B funding.

Online payments company Square has introduced a new platform whereby users can send cash via email. It's called Square Cash. To use it a consumer doesn't have to join or sign in. They simply compose an email, copy a Square email address and include the dollar amount in the subject line.

Princeton's Ed Felten has defended Lavabit's right to resist court orders. "At Lavabit, an employee, on receiving a court order, copies user data and gives it to an outside party-in this case, the government," he wrote in a blog post. "Meanwhile, over at Guavabit, an employee, on receiving a bribe or extortion threat from a drug cartel, copies user data and gives it to an outside party-in this case, the drug cartel. From a purely technological standpoint, these two scenarios are exactly the same." Lavabit shut down in August after receiving pressure from the government to share information about its …