A spam email is in circulation pretending to be from cloud services firm Box. The emails tell recipients that the message their image files have been downloaded and encourage them to reupload the images. The email instructs recipients to click on malware links in order to address the issue. The links lead to a fake Canadian pharmacy website.

MailTrack is a new service that allows Gmail Chrome users to receive alerts when emails that they have sent are opened. The platform works by adding an image in the outgoing email that renders when the email is opened. However, it won't work if the recipient turns off automatic image loading.

Mobile commerce sales will reach $100 billion this year according to a new report from Forrester and email marketing firm Campaigner. According to the report, 51 percent of consumers have purchased an item using a mobile device, however only 28 percent did so after receiving a marketing email.

Microsoft will stop using email to issue security notifications as of July 1st. The new policy applies to security bulletin advance notifications, security bulletin summaries, new security advisories and bulletins. The change is in response to a new Canadian anti-spam law.

Google has come up with a new way to make it easier for apps to pull data from Gmail user's email accounts. The company revealed the news at a developer conference in San Francisco this week. The initiative would turn Gmail into a platform for developers to take the contents of a users' email and apply it to an app. For example, a travel app could scan a user's email to pull out data about airline bookings and hotel reservations in order to turn them into a comprehensive itinerary for the user's trip. This type of technology already exists among …

As more marketers are adopting social media as a customer service channel, consumers still report better experiences via email, phone, IM and text than via Facebook and Twitter. Still marketers are looking to social as a potential channel to offer service. In fact, according to a new report from Forrester Research and social customer service firm Conversocial, 67 percent of the marketers surveyed reported that social customer service is growing in importance in the U.S. and U.K. However, only 33 percent of the social customer-service technology in use is being actually in place for customer service purposes. The rest is …

US-based retailer Vera Bradley is sending less email these days but their emails are actually more effective. Instead of sending out batch and blast emails as they did in the past, the company has been using data to segment its list and send more personalized emails to customers based on past behaviors. According to Women's Wear Daily the store has reduced its email marketing volume by 63 percent, yet at the same time, the company's browser-to-purchaser conversion rate has increased by 2.75 times.

Marketers targeting millenials in English-speaking countries should not necessarily send emails in English. According to a new study from customer experience management business firm SDL, 32 percent of millennial consumers based in the UK prefer to place e-commerce orders in a language other than English.

Taking advantage of demand for secure email in the era of NSA spying, German-based company Posteo has launched a new service that allows people to anonymously create a secure email account. The account, which costs around 12-25 euro a year, can even be paid for anonymously. The company promises not to give away any personal information to any agency. In fact,the company deletes credit card information after a payment is received and even offers users the ability to pay with cash in the mail.

Microsoft Exchange Online users have taken to Twitter to complain about email outages. A number of users revealed that they were not receiving email earlier this week. A number of users reported bounce backs when they sent emails or marks as undeliverable. Microsoft has said that the issue is now fixed. The email platform is available as a standalone service or as part of Microsoft's Office 365 bundle.