Kansas Republican Kevin Yoder has added an amendment to the House's fiscal 2015 version Financial Services and General Government appropriations bill in regards to an update in email privacy law. The amendment would prevent money in the bill from being used to require email service providers to disclose the contents of customer emails without a warrant. The amendment was adopted in a meeting on Wednesday.

Jennifer O'Connor, a White House lawyer, testified in the IRS email scandal case this week saying that she had no prior knowledge that Lerner's emails were lost in a 2011 computer crash. O'Connor explained that she was no longer at the agency when the crash had allegedly taken place earlier this year. House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa subpoenaed O'Connor as a witness because she was involved in overseeing IRS document collection in in the committee's requests for materials.

The State of Montana's Department of Public Health and Human Services server has been hacked. Criminals were able to gain access to the personal information, including the email addresses of 1.3 million people. The organization said that there is no evidence that any of the information was used for criminal purposes but is offering free credit report monitoring for victims. An independent forensic investigation of the server revealed the hack.

Houston, Texas based medical groups are encouraging email communications between patients and doctors. The offices have been encouraging patients to enroll in their secure electronic information systems which lets them access their medical records, test results and email health care providers, all for free. The trend comes at a time when Americans have expressed interest in this kind of service. According to a recent survey by Catalyst Healthcare Research, 93 percent of American adults said they prefer doctors who will respond to email.

Mobile email open rates in the consumer services, hospitality and financial services industries all passed 50 percent in the second half of 2013, according to a new report from Knotice. The report, which analyzed 1 billion emails in the second half of 2013, also revealed that across industries the number of emails opened on a mobile device increased to 48 percent by the end of 2013. This represents a 33 percent spike over the second half of 2012.

RetirementJobs.com, a career site dedicated to job seekers over 50, has plans to send 25 million emails a month within the next three years. The company's big plans come after recently revamping its email program. Since the company began working with SMTP two years ago, the career website has grown its email program 400 percent -- growing from sending one million emails a month to five million a month.

The Parliament of Northern Ireland recently upgraded its staff email to Microsoft Office software, but has received a number of complaints over the design. Apparently the staff doesn't approve of the color scheme or the location of the file/print/save buttons for the Outlook 2013 platform. The government agency has responded by giving staffers tips on how to personalize their inbox colors. In addition, they let Microsoft know about the complaints to keep this in mind for future updates.

Cloud-storage compliance firm Sookasa is making it easier to open secure attachments from emails without having to attach a file. Instead, email senders can send a Sookasa-secured file to a recipient that is immediately available to download by clicking on a link. During the download, the file is protected by the compliance tool. The process includes a two-step authentication -- when a user opens the first email, a second email is triggered with the link to the download.

The Swiss-based encrypted email service ProtonMail has raised almost $200,000 in funding from its crowd funding campaign on Indiegogo. The company, which is working on an "NSA-proof" email platform, exceeded its $160,000 goal within three days of launching.

Half of the Canadian Justice Department was tricked by a scam email. According to an internal survey about 2,000 staffers clicked on a link in a phishing email raising eyebrows about the department's security. The organization sent out the mock spam email in December as part of a security exercise to 5,000 employees to see if they could tell the difference between a real email and a spam mail. The message looked official but led to a fake website.