New Mexico governor's former campaign manager Jamie Estrada has pleaded guilty to two felony counts in a case of illegally intercepting email. As part of a plea deal, he agreed to plead guilty to one count of unlawful interception of electronic communication and one count of lying to FBI agents. He was facing a dozen felony charges for illegally accessing his former email account.

The Email Privacy Act is gaining momentum in the House. The bill secured its 218th co-sponsor late on Tuesday, giving the act the majority backing that it needs to advance. "Having a majority of house members supporting our bill shows House leadership that the bill would pass ... if it was put on the house floor," Kevin Yoder, one of the bill's sponsors told The Hill. The bill would update the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act, which currently allows law enforcement agencies to read emails that have been stored for 180 days without a warrant.

Pluto Mail a new email app which is currently available in limited beta, hopes to be "the Snapchat of email." The startup, which recently raised $30,000 in funding, lets users make their emails disappear, as well as edit sent emails before they are opened. The tool works from directly within an email client and works by making .jpegs out of messages and attachments before they are sent. The jpegs disappear once the email expires.

Data services and email marketing firm Acxiom has sold its U.K. call center company 2Touch to Parseq,in a deal whose terms were not disclosed. The sale reflects Acxiom's positioning to focus more on technology. "This divestiture allows Acxiom to maintain a strong portfolio and concentrate on initiatives that further its vision of enabling one-to-one targeted marketing at scale across all channels and devices," stated Scott Howe, president and CEO of Acxiom.

Rapportive and email widget that allows Gmail users to see LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter information about contacts in a sidebar to the inbox is getting a redesign and losing some of its core features. This is the first redesign since LinkedIn bought the tool in 2012. The app will no longer support 'Raplets,' a CRM tool that had allowed users to pull data and take notes on contacts.

Former IRS commissioner Lois Lerner is scheduled to testify before two House committees next week to address the assertion that the agency lost thousands of emails that investigators have requested. The emails are being sought as part of an investigation into accusations that the agency participated in misconduct motivated by politics. The committee's job is to determine if justice is being obstructed in the loss of these emails.

Hop, an iOS email management app, has been updated to include a new feature for group discussions. The new element is called "Hop Groups," and it allows users to create group messages and to easily add and remove members without the strict control of an administrator.

Virtu, an app designed to provide privacy for email users in an era of NSA-spying, has raised $6 million in funding. The company will use the money to continue to work on its tool, which works with cloud-based email services such as Gmail and Yahoo Mail. The company was founded by two brothers, one of whom previously worked as an engineer at the NSA.

Time Warner Cable claims that it has fixed the issues with its Road Runner email service, yet some users are still having issues. Users have been experiencing outages with the service for the past week. A Time Warner company spokesman told Press Connects that the email system "has stabilized and we continue to monitor it closely."

Personalized email messages have an open rate of almost 15 percent higher than unpersonalized emails, according to a new report from Silverpop. In addition, according to Silverpop's 2014 Email Marketing Metrics Benchmark Report, personalized emails had a 79 percent higher click through rate than manual counterparts. The study also revealed that transactional messages sent by companies with results in the top-quartile have open rates four times higher than median open rates for non-transactional messages had a higher click through and open rate than non transactional messages.