Charity: water was looking to raise $1.7 million to deliver clean well water to 26,000 people Rwanda's Rulindo District, an area where 70% of the population doesn't have access to clean water. The non-profit worked with Responsys to send a series of messages telling the story of the people in Rwanda to targeted lists of potential donors. In a little over a month, the company had raised $2 million and the company saw email open rates increase 21 percent over the previous year's campaign.

Barnes & Noble is going to be adding a web browser and an email client to its Nook Simple touch eReader next week, according to reports. According to the source, this update will hit on June 1st. For now, the Nook Simple Touch only offers users limited web access through a hidden web browser.

According to a new report from email marketing services company Bronto, creating relevant emails is a bigger challenge for e-commerce marketers than driving conversion rates. For the report, Bronto interviewed 200 online retailers and brand marketers and 31% replied "making email targeted and relevant," while 24% said "driving orders." The report also revealed that 58% of online retailers said that conversion rate was the key driver of email revenue, and 30% said list growth was a key driver in revenue.

According to online security company Symantec, 65.9% of all email is spam. And while a majority of these malware messages get caught in filters, this wastes a lot of time, network bandwidth and computer power, argues Jeremy LaTrasse, CEO/co-founder of Message Bus and a co-founder of Twitter. To fight the spam problem, LaTrasse urges mass senders to follow ISP rules and policies, keep up to date on sending laws, use SPF and DKIM tools, as well as to scan the web for "cousin" domains, fake sites that exist with names similar to their brand.

In North Carolina, a new law passed by the state Senate would make it illegal for automakers from "using a computer or other communications facilities, hardware, or equipment" to sell cars to citizens of North Carolina. The electric carmaker Tesla has no dealerships in the state and would therefore be unable to conduct business via email. The law is an update to a 1970s measure that was passed with the intention of protecting franchised dealerships from competing against dealers owned by car companies. The current bill is being sent to the state's House of Representatives where it will be voted …

CQuotient, a Bain Capital Ventures-backed startup, has introduced a new email marketing tool to the marketplace that marketers can use to send personalized emails. The tool creates emails with recommended products based on data that a marketer has about each individual customer. CQuotient, which sells its product in a software-as-a-service mode, has six retail clients including The Children's Place.

There is a phishing email message going around that claims to be from Walmart. The spammers made a pretty major mistake though, as they spelled the company's name wrong, spelling it "Wallmart," instead of 'Walmart.' The email contains links to malicious sites which should not be clicked on. If you receive this email, delete it or report it as spam.

Digital marketing services company Silverpop has released a new tool that aims to make real-time personalized communications based on behvaioral data possible. The new offering, which is called "Universal Behaviors," stores and processes data as individual exchanges rather than in volumes of interactions. The idea is that marketers can use this buyer behavior data to build personalized campaigns in real time.

Google has updated its Google Wallet service and added a feature that lets users send money to and from Google Wallet via email. Users can send money to people with or without a Gmail account. Google also released new APIs for developers to make buying stuff within Android apps and on the Web easier for consumers using the Google Wallet.

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said that he supports changes to email privacy regulations that would require the government to get a warrant based on probable cause in order to read a citizen's email. Holder does support the idea that law enforcement should be able to obtain content directly from service providers if they have the right paperwork in place. As ZDNet reports, Holder said that there were "very limited circumstances" in which there should be exemptions.