The U.S. Postal Service is applying to trademark a software that will allow it to sell email encryption services. On September 6th, the agency filed for the brand "United States Postal Service Digital Services," which includes selling, "tamper-detection capabilities" for protecting electronic documents. According to the filing, the software would work by verifying the identities of people transmitting information and making sure that the intended recipients are the only ones to receive the information.

LinkedIn has denied accusations that the company breaks into the email accounts of its users to harvest their contacts' addresses. Four users filed a class action suit against the company last week, charging that the social networking site hacked into their external email accounts without permission and then used these addresses to promote the site's services. In a blog post, LinkedIn denied the charges claiming that it does not hack into members' accounts and claims that any access it uses is with user permission.

Daily-deal company LivingSocial is refocusing its business model from selling time-sensitive offers to being an company that gives retailers e-commerce tools. At the same time, the company has introduced a new set of tools to help merchants analyze their sales and campaigns. While LivingSocial will continue to send emails to subscribers, the company has been revamping its search box on its site and app in a move to help consumers connect with offers through site and mobile search.

Digital marketing services firm ExactTarget, a salesforce.com company, released a new user interface for its email marketing products this week. One cool feature is the ability to measure Gmail Tabs engagement data. The redesign also allows marketers to manage data in real time with drag-and-drop segmentation, ad hoc customer reporting, and campaign performance benchmarking from Return Path.

Email marketers with Hotmail and Outlook.com subscribers on their list, listen up. Microsoft has reorganized the way it is delivering email to these email addresses and many email messages are ending up in the spam folder. The new system is delivering Microsoft Outlook owns 17% of the email market, so marketers that would like to reach these subscribers should consider getting on Microsoft's whitelist.

Cisco managers meant to send an email among management about an online training program. But someone accidentally cced thousands of other employees around the globe and sent the message to thousands of other Cisco employees. In the end, the reply chain included four million emails sent, using up more than 375GB of network traffic until Cisco's IT cut it off. An insider estimated the time-wasting incurred to cost the company about $600,000.

Samantha Geimer, the woman at the center of Roman Polanski's underage sex scandal from 1977, admits that she has been in touch with Polanski over email in recent years. Geimer revealed this fact in her new memoir, The Girl. Polanski first got in touch with Geimer a few years ago after Marina Zenovich's documentary on the trial came out. He apologized to her, writing, "I want you to know how sorry I am for having so affected your life."

The average worker spends 13 hours a week, or about 28% of their workweek, doing email, according to a new report from McKinsey Global Institute. "In the 90s, people actually looked forward to opening their email," Dmitri Leonov, VP of email management app SaneBox, told The Huffington Post. In response to this news, the blog put together a list of ways to avoid spending too much time on email such as not prioritizing email and realizing that not all emails are created equally.

Digital marketing services company ExactTarget, a salesforce.com company, has expanded its mobile marketing offerings. The company now supports the ability for marketers to send MMS campaigns, as well as location-based push notifications, and rich push notifications to apps on smartphones and tablets. These new features are part of ExactTarget's MobileConnect and MobilePush applications.

An alliance of digital civil liberties groups including Internet companies Reddit and DuckDuckGo are pushing for a new bill to reform the Electronic Communications Privacy Act a 1986 online privacy law that is widely considered out-of-date. The coalition relaunched VanishingRights.com, a website that supports the Email Privacy Act, a bill that would require law enforcement officials to obtain a warrant in order to access the content of a citizen's email or documents stored in the cloud.