Revelations that the government has been accessing the email accounts of citizens has brought email privacy reform legislation to the mainstream. Even before Edward Snowden leaked documents exposing the NSA's surveillance programs, politicians on both sides of the aisle had been working to update the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act which currently governs email privacy laws. The act does not require law enforcement to get a warrant to access the email of suspected criminals. Reformers hope to require a warrant from a judge in order for the police to read a suspected criminal's email.

How does Edward Snowden send email? According to Business Insider, he uses Lavabit, a tool that allows Gmail users to keep their emails private from Google. The service launched in 2004. The founders liked Gmail as an email tool but felt that the service lacked a good privacy policy because Google scans emails for keywords in order to serve ads. Lavabit offers a number of different services including an email encryption tool called asymmetric encryption, which encrypts incoming messages before they are saved on the server. These encrypted messages are only accessible to someone who has the account password.

Earlier this month artist and filmmaker Miranda July kicked off an art project in which she shares the personal emails of a group of celebrities based on a theme. The idea came after writer Sheila Heti interviewed July for Bad Day Magazine. Heti was inspired by the interview and asked if they could stay in touch through weekly phone calls and emails. The correspondence turned into a friendship and an the idea of drawing digital portraits of celebrities based on their email exchanges.

LinkedIn is updating its API and because of this Job Change Notifier, a third-party app that sends emails to LinkedIn users when one of their connections changed jobs, will be wiped out. LinkedIn is placing new restrictions on its API and the new API only allows third-party apps to access user data for 60 days unless the user re-authenticates it.

Microsoft reportedly gave the National Security Agency special access to its users private emails and Skype calls as part of the secret PRISM surveillance program. The latest details have emerged from new documents that whistleblower Edward Snowden shared with The Guardian. According to the report, Microsoft allowed the NSA to access Outlook.com email accounts by avoiding encryption. In addition, the technology company reportedly gave the government access to its cloud storage system and Skype video calls.

Most business people are overwhelmed with email, so if you are cold emailing someone that you'd like to do business with, you have to be savvy to get their attention. In a piece penned for Forbes, Chris Fralic, partner at First Round Capital in New York, gives advice on how to break through and get a busy person's attention in a crowded inbox. He writes, "Vague requests for 'help' waste everyone's scarce time. Specific requests for certain kinds of assistance are more actionable."

Microsoft has analyzed its Outlook.com email users to classify their varying personality types. Fast Company spoke with Dharmesh Mehta, senior director of Outlook.com, who claims that there are three different categories that email users fall into based on their daily interactions with their inboxes: deleters, filers and pilers. The deleters, which make up about half of email users, start their day by deleting about a third of their inboxes. The filers use tools to organize and file the messages in their inboxes. The pilers have thousands upon thousands of emails building up in their inboxes and they don't do much …

Small-to-medium businesses are expected to increase their use of email by 85% in 2013, according to new metrics from email services provider AWeber. The growth is expected as more tools have become available to support the email needs of smaller businesses who don't have the same resources as larger companies. To address this growth, Infogroup subsidiary InfoUSA has added new targeting tools for small business email services. The new features include the ability to target by organization-specific categories, executive title, type of business, geography, size of business by sales volume, number of employees, and website address.

The BBC monitored the email accounts of 30 employees in 2012. These communications were monitored because the employees were suspected of various company policy violations including leaking information, bribery, participating in malicious communication, harassment, computer misuse and theft. The company's internal investigation service monitored the emails. The monitoring has led some to accuse the BBC of targeting whistleblowers. The BBC denies this allegation.

Email marketing services company StrongMail has changed its name to StrongView, in a move to represent the company's expanding suite of services beyond just email. StrongView's capabilities look at the entire view of a customer across multiple channels and interactions, combining marketing execution with customer intelligence, rather than simply focusing on siloed touchpoints. As part of the relaunch, StrongView has plans to release new marketing features this fall.