DMI Music, a digital agency that connects brands with bands, has introduced a new platform that lets email marketers include songs from popular music artists in their email messages. Nutritional supplement maker Mead Johnson is testing the idea and including songs from artists ranging from Bruno Mars to Bach to help liven up its email messages. The songs play when a recipient clicks a trigger point within the email. In one of the first campaigns, 75 percent of consumers that opened the email listened to the music, and 43 percent of those that did listened to the song more than …

Ben Grosser, an Illinois-based digital artist has created a Gmail plugin that automatically adds blacklisted words to every email that you send. The plugin is called ScareMail. It is a protest against online surveillance and adds keywords to emails so that they will be flagged and read by the NSA. It works the opposite of other tools that aim to mask the contents of an email message.

Australian retailer and auction site GraysOnline has been fined about $155,694 by the Australian government for allegedly violating Australia's Spam Act. The company apparently did not include the ability to opt out of its emails within its emails, and the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) fined the retailer for this violation. Under the Spam Act in Australia, all marketing emails must be permission-based and include an opt-out.

PeeqPeeq, an iOS app that turns email marketing messages in the inbox into a shoppable catalog, is launching its first major update today. The app was initially designed for Gmail, but the update now includes compatibility for all Microsoft email domains, like Hotmail, Live and Outlook. The app has also been redesigned for iOS 7, and is optimized to make shopping from emails bright and colorful.

Yahoo has been removing contacts from Yahoo Mail users' contacts lists without permission from these users. The company has apparently taken upon itself to edit a user's contact list and remove old email addresses. Yahoo Customer Care explained to one user in this email, "Yahoo! wants to make sure your address book is filled with the most current and valid emails to those family, friends and contacts you need to reach. We noticed that you had emails in your address book that are no longer valid, so we have removed them."

AOL is planning to halt support for AOL email users that wish to access their email from Apple's iCloud service through AOL's newish Alto webmail client. Alto, a web-based mail client that intelligently sorts and integrates email from platforms including Apple's iCloud, Gmail, Yahoo, and AOL, will stop supporting iCloud as of December 2nd. On this day iCloud accounts will automatically be disabled, but the company recommends that users manually disarm their iCloud accounts in advance of this date.

Constant Contact, an email marketing services provider that caters to small businesses, has updated its email marketing platform with two new features. The company is now embedding a more robust set of reporting features into its native contact manager to help users track campaigns easier. In addition, the company has added a MyLibrary component to its dashboard, so that users can store images and documents within the platform.

Email client app Unroll.me, a tool that lets users consolidate email subscriptions into one 'Rollup' and even unsubscribe from multiple newsletters at a time, has introduced a new service that lets users block email senders. It's called 'Contact Blocking,' and the feature allows users to now create a list of contacts that have emailed them or which are stored in their contact list and block them from getting through to the inbox.

Monetate has introduced a new email marketing tool that is designed to help send automated offers based on what they might be experience in the present moment, such as offers for umbrellas during a rainstorm. The Monetate Email service price will be based on the amount of traffic that a merchant has to their e-commerce site and what other Monetate products the retailer is selling.

Cloud marketing platform provider Emailvision has changed its name to SmartFocus. The new name was chosen to help represent the company's growing multichannel marketing automation tools. The company has been selling these new services for some time now, and their name felt old SmartFocus CEO Brad Wilson told Direct Marketing News. The company, which is better known in Europe than in the U.S., is pushing to expand their business in North America.