British supermarket chain Tesco revealed that 2,239 of its customers' online accounts were compromised and their personal details were published on text sharing site Pastebin. The retailer has deactivated those accounts. The customers' email addresses, passwords and Tesco Clubcard point balances were part of the leak.

Mobile payment company Square has created a new tool called Square Cash that allows a user to pay another person via email. The user can pull funds from their bank account and transfer them to another's account simply by sending email email. The new tool is supported by Android and iOS devices, and many email clients.

Apple is applying for a patent to stop people from creating throwaway email addresses which are used to send spam messages. The system would stop spammers from generating disposable email addresses at the server level and act as a screen for incoming spam mail. The software would tag these email accounts with contextual clues to help users follow the source responsible for selling an address to a spammer.

MIT has issued an apology for mistakenly sending an email to applicants telling them that they had been accepted into the university. The email went out this week promoting the school's financial aid, closing with the sentence: "You are on this list because you are admitted to MIT." This was not true for many of the recipients who will have to wait until next month to find out if they have been accepted. The error happened as email lists were combined.

IronBox, a Redmond-based security startup, has launched a new tool designed to encrypt emails sent through Outlook. The product is called IronBox for Outlook, and lets email users encrypt their messages within a plugin on Outlook's toolbar. The target audience is lawyers, accountants and other professionals that need to keep their emails private.

Target's major data breach that took place over the holidays has been traced back to a malware email attack sent to employees at an HVAC firm which partnered with the retailer. The hack exposed credit card and personal data on more than 110 million consumers. Investigators have traced the breach back to network credentials that Target had given to Fazio Mechanical, a heating, air conditioning and refrigeration partner. Those credentials were stolen from a spam attack at Fazio.

Tocomail is a new iOS app that is designed to be a child's first email service. The tool lets kids send emails and parents monitor their communications, as well as determine who their child can accept email from in return. The app is outfitted with drawing tools that users can create colorful messages to send to accepted contacts.

San Francisco-based Streak has created a plugin that lets Gmail account holders track which of their emails have been and opened, along with the exact time they were opened and how many times the email has been viewed since. The tool also lets Gmail users track which device people are reading their emails on, along with the reader's location.

More than one-fifth of married or seriously involved American Internet users share an email address, according to a new report from Pew Research Center's Internet and American Life Project. The research revealed that 27 percent of couples share an email account. In addition, two-thirds of couples share passwords for one or more of their online accounts with their significant other.

Even though Google filters marketing messages into Promotions tabs, this isn't hurting marketers. In fact, Gmail users are the most engaged consumers of all users. According to a new report from Yesmail,19 percent of Gmail users were active in the past 12 months, as compared to 14 percent for Yahoo, 12 percent for Hotmail and 10 percent for AOL. Gmail is also growing faster than any other free webmail service. The research also revealed that Gmail users accounted for 43 percent of all new subscribers in Q4, compared to Yahoo at 32 percent, and double that of Hotmail.