Stripe, a San Francisco-based payments start-up, has a very open email policy. The company lets any employee access any email sent within the company by making it internally public and searchable. The idea behind this transparent policy is that if every email is accessible, then everyone at the company will be aware of what is going on with the business, cutting down the number of meetings and increasing workflow.

The FBI is pushing for the right to access a consumer's email, cloud services, or chat programs. Under the current Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, the FBI can force phone companies to tap a consumer's phone, but these digital communications are not currently accessible to FBI investigators. General counsel Andrew Weissmann revealed said in a talk to the American Bar Association last week getting the power to monitor these kinds of digital communications in real time is a "top priority this year," reports Gizmodo.

Homeland security secretary Janet Napolitano thinks that email is a waste of time. "In many respects, in a job like mine, it's inefficient," she said at a breakfast Tuesday hosted by The Christian Science Monitor. Napolitano is also not keen on texting or Twitter. She prefers to speak on the phone.

A little bit less than a third of doctors emailed with their patients in 2012, which was up from 27 percent from five years earlier, according to a report by Manhattan Research, a market research firm that analyzes the health care industry. Doctors who do email patients are finding that it is a good way to communicate with patients without playing phone tag. They also hope it will prevent inaccurate online searches and the wrong self-diagnosis. Those who don't use email are concerned about privacy, security, liability, and the potential to miscommunicate important medical information.

According to a study done by The Relevancy Group, only 23 percent of email marketers are using a tool to measure their performance and against the competition. That number is growing as 24 percent of marketers said they plan on analyzing their competitors' email marketing messages this year. David Daniels, founder of the email research firm The Relevancy Group, argues that having competitive insight helps marketers optimize their performance. According to the report, 56 percent of marketers whose email programs contribute 25 percent or more of their overall corporate revenue use an email marketing competitive analysis tool.

British intelligence agency MI5 has warned UK citizens and members of the public abroad not to respond to emails and phone calls coming from scammers who are posing as spies. The security service warned of the scam on its website explaining that spammers have sent messages which claim to be from M15 officials including MI5 director general Sir Jonathan Evans. The requests solicit money from the recipients. The agency has asked anyone who receives these emails or calls to report it to the police.

Five people Slovenians were arrested for allegedly sending spam emails to the accounting departments of small and medium businesses. The email looked to come from a local bank or the Slovenian State Tax Authority and warned recipients about late payment fees. The email encouraged victims to share banking information.It also came with an attachment that was infected with a trojan.The scam cost Slovenians around $2.5 million.

CoreMotives, a marketing automation company operating completely within Microsoft Dynamics CRM, has been focusing on globalizing its product and has added German, Brazilian Portuguese, Chinese and Japanese versions of its SMB toolset since email marketing services company Silverpop acquired the company last year. The company also revealed that it has increased its billings by 136 percent and added more than 270 customers since the acquisition. New clients include The Seattle Seahawks, Sounders FC and the Anaheim Ducks.

Web-based spam is on the rise, and it is often better at getting past traditional security defenses than email-based malware, according to a new study from Palo Alto Networks. In its Modern Malware Review report, the company revealed that almost 90 percent of "unknown malware" came from browsing the Web, compared to just 2 percent which came from email. In addition, the report found that antivirus vendors are better at detecting email malware than Web-based spam.

Despite talk of getting rid of email at some businesses, email isn't going anywhere in the work place. In fact, according to Radicati the number of business emails that will be sent will increase by 13 percent every year between now and 2016. As volume goes up, professionals will have to find better ways to organize and manage their email, and IT departments will have to improve their servers and systems for maintaining email workflow and security.