For consumers who are curious just what the government looks at when tapping into private email conversations, MIT researchers have created Immersion. If you give it permission, the tool will look at the metadata of your emails and create a map of patterns. It's the same data the government is able to access. These patterns show your digital relationships to different people in an interactive graphic with lots of dots and circles which represent your email exchanges.

The Iranian government has opened a national email service and is assigning an email address to every Iranian citizen. The country's postal service will manage the new email service. The country has been known to occasionally block access to foreign email providers including Gmail and Yahoo. In addition, accessing the internet through private networks and access banned websites is illegal in Iran.

Passwords can be easy to crack into, and that is why adding two-factor authentication to email helps make it more secure. The second level of security requires something like a mobile device or a smart card or fingerprints to help make email difficult to break into. Gmail and Yahoo both offer two-factor authentication tools. Microsoft doesn't offer it for all Outlook.com users, but paying customers that are members of Xbox Live, Microsoft's online billing portal, or Sky Drive can add a two-factor authentication tool.

With databases being breached left and right, consumers should be more careful about how they approach email. Fox Business has rounded up a list of 11 mistakes that email users make. They range from checking email on an unsafe public network to not deleting old emails properly and using the same email login name and password.

AT&T has filed a patent for "self-destructing e-mail" in a move that would give users more control over their messages. The patent, explains that the technology would let people send emails that self-destruct after they're read, or after a certain period of time designated by the sender. Senders of the self-destructing emails could also prevent the messages from being forwarded or saved.

Information requests get responded to quicker than complex email messages, according to new research from Carnegie Mellon University. The study, which set out to understand how people respond to incoming email, also found that social messages also get a quick reply because they’re fun.

Twitter is trying to make its ads more targeted by using information from cookies and a users' scrambled email address. For example, a local florist that wants to run a holiday special on Twitter, can show their ad to flower customers that have visited their website or are subscribers to their newsletter. The florist can share scrambled email addresses of customers with Twitter along with browser related information. Twitter can then match that information with Twitter accounts in order to target deals.

Clothing retailer Chico's created digital cards wanted to generate support for the Children's Miracle Network (CMN) Hospitals for its third annual "May Is for Miracles" campaign, and to do so, they created a multichannel effort. Consumers were encouraged to create "Send a Smile" to sick kids in hospitals and share the news with friends. Users could create customized digital cards and share them via email or their social network. Those cards were then printed and shared with children at local CMN hospitals. The brand promised to donate $1 for each card created, up to a total of $50,000. The campaign …

Constant Contact's Julie Niehoff and Y Gen Out Loud founder Tamara Bell discuss how email marketing and email newsletters specifically are a great way for generation Y business owners to communicate with customers. When integrated with social media, email can help young business owners create a loyal following.

Front Range Internet, a Colorado-based Internet service provider, is working to restore email service to its customers after an update to its email platform created issues for about 16,000 of its email users. The company said that 90% of its issues would be resolved by Wednesday. The issue was unexpected but due to compatibility issues of the new email platform.