In a move to make its email marketing efforts more effective among inactive subscribers, Limoges Jewelry and its email provider Responsys created an email series target at email subscribers who hadn't opened an email in six months. The idea was to win back these customers, cut the frequency of emails they received or simply remove them from the list. The series of emails included motivating offers, and those people that didn't open the emails got a chance to control their frequency, before being removed from the list. The campaign did the best during the 2012 holiday season and the 2013 …

Filtering email messages into its own folder could actually help marketers, according to Forrester analyst Sucharita Mulpuru. "The segregation could actually be helpful because people can quickly scan in one place things that may/may not be relevant without having to hunt for personal emails in a sea of mixed clutter," she told Time. Last month Google introduced Gmail tabs, putting marketing messages into a promotional column and ever since then marketers have been keeping a close eye on whether or not this new filtering system will hurt their email efforts. According to report published by Forrester in June, consumers are …

Cloud-based email service SendGrid has joined the Google Cloud Platform Partner Program in a move that allows App Engine to add transactional email services to their apps. Having SendGrid available gives developers the ability to build add transactional email platforms for their apps and then test and deploy them through the Google Cloud Platform. SendGrid then gives developers access to real-time analytics and reporting via a Suite of APIs.

After the UK government put into place strict controls over the consumption of Internet online, the hacktivist group Anonymous encouraged Internet users to flood the inboxes of a few hundred government and county council officers with their favorite porn images as part of "Operation Pornstorm." The government took the threat seriously but it appears that the effort may have petered out before it ever got started. So far, the campaign has yet to impact the government's ability to send and receive email.

The personal Gmail accounts of three different White House employees have been breached in what is likely to be a hack targeted at Obama's social media outreach team. The hackers have been using the hacked accounts to send other White House digital media staffers spam emails with malicious links that are designed to gain the personal email logins and Twitter credentials of the users. More than a dozen people were targeted in the attack.

Recording artist James Blunt has had to apologize for an email that went out to people across the UK promoting his music, after Twitter users complained about receiving "spam." The email included a link to download a new track from Blunt and apparently many Twitter users didn't appreciate getting the unsolicited email. One Twitter user wrote, "Let me see if I've got this right. If we want porn we have to opt IN, but if we don't want James Blunt we have to opt OUT?" Blunt took to Twitter to apologize for the email blast. "Oops... Just emailed the whole …

Adding the personal touch to marketing messages can have a positive impact. Sixty-one percent of U.S. consumers feel more positive about a brand when they send personalized marketing messages, according to new research from Responsys. The report also revealed that 44 percent of consumers are less responsive to non-personalized messages. In addition, 53 percent are more likely to buy something from a brand that uses personalized marketing and 52percent trust brands that let consumers their digital communications marketing preferences.

David Kernell, the hacker who served a year in prison for hacking into Sarah Palin's personal email account back in 2008 when she was running for vice president, has ended his probation period early. A student of a student at the University of Tennessee at the time, Kernell was caught illegally accessing Palin's email account, changing her password and posting in online forums on her behalf. He served a year in prison for his crime and he was supposed to serve on probation until November 2014, but a federal judge agreed to Kernell's request to end his probation early.

Cryptome.org, an organization dedicated to government transparency, has published the names and email addresses of 1,350 corporate leaders, media figures and policy executives who served on the Council on Foreign Relations. According to The Council on Foreign Relations, hackers gained access to this private information by breaking into one individual's email account, rather than hacking into the entire organization's computer network.

Spam emails are on the rise and they are becoming harder to distinguish than they have been in the past as spammers have gotten better at creating "phishing" emails that look like they are coming from real companies. According to research from Verizon Communications almost every incident of online espionage in 2012 involved a phishing attack. American Airlines was the victim of a recent phishing attack and it was hard to distinguish the emails from real American emails. Walmart was also the victim recently. Even though the spam email spelled the company's name wrong, the email reached 2 million consumers, …