Email is stressing people out, discovered a team of researchers led by professor Tom Jackson of Loughborough University. The researches followed a group of thirty government employees and discovered that 83 percent got more stressed while using email, and 92 percent got stressed when speaking on the phone and using email at the same time. The researchers analyzed heart rate, blood pressure and saliva samples to measure stress hormones, which were highest when email inboxes were full.

Online marketing tools giant Salesforce.com has agreed to buy digital marketing services firm ExactTarget, a company that offers email marketing software, for $2.5 billion. The acquisition is the largest in Salesforce's history, though the company is not new to acquisition. In the past year, the company has bought up eight companies including Buddy Media, a company that helps brands manage Facebook and Twitter pages.

Britain's Defense Secretary Philip Hammond, Home Secretary Theresa May and former police minister Nick Herbert are pushing for a controversial Communications Data Bill to be reintroduced. The bill would require Internet service companies to keep the email and social media records of users and let police access the data, though not the content of the messages. Supporters hope that the ruling will make it easier for British officials to fight terrorism. Critics claim that the bill infringes on privacy.

German courier company Deutsche Post has filed a complaint to the European Commission against a German law that will require government agencies and public services to use a competitor's email system. According to Deutsche Post, a bill that will require these German organizations to use "De-Mail", an email platform from Deutsche Telekom and United Internet, violates EU laws in that it discriminates against Deutsche Post's email service "E-Postbrief".

French technology startup company Kiwup has introduced a new email newsletter plaform called Stamplia. The tool lets publishers and marketers purchase templates for email newsletters from web designers who can sell their HTML wares, along with transactional emails and signup forms. The idea is to connect companies with better designs and help them focus on the content of their message.

A British telecommunications company is moving the default email service for its customers away from Yahoo Mail and over to BT Mail, after a number of customers reported that their Yahoo accounts were hacked. Yahoo will only lose about 6 million users, a drop in the bucket of its 280 million worldwide user base. But still, it doesn't look good for the company which has been experiencing a high number of spam and hacking complaints in recent months.

While it may not stop the feds from snooping on citizens' digital conversations, Internet activist/blogger Cory Doctorow says that if Texas passes email privacy legislation, it would be symbolic. Doctorow wrote on the Boing Boing blog this week, that "it's an important step toward establishing a better norm in privacy standards for files on cloud-based services." The bill, which would require law enforcement to get a warrant to read email which is stricter than the current policy. Today, law enforcement is required to follow the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act, in which no warrant is needed for officials to access …

Stripe, an online payments system used by developers, is now allowing its cusomters to send email receipts directly to their consumers. Businesses can turn on the email receipts feature under the emails section of their Stripe dashboard. The feature came in response to customer requests.

Email marketing services company Vocus has added new email tools to its Vocus Marketing Suite, including a feature that lets marketers send event-driven triggered emails by date. In addition, the updated tool kit includes a dual message creation feature so that marketers can create A/B split tests. The update also brings the ability to append Google Analytics parameters within emails to track a campaign's effect on Web traffic.

Google released an updated version of Gmail this week which allow users to read their incoming mail into tabbed sections. One such section is the "Promotions" tab, which could mean that email marketing messages aren't getting into the main inbox, but rather a sub-folder in which marketing messages live. As Business Insider points out, this could mean that senders will see a drop in open rates when sending to contacts that use the Promotions tab. If this starts to happen, marketers could try to send plain text emails, which will be automatically sent to the mail inbox. These emails can …