Average email open rates increased 6 percent during Q1 2014 as compared to Q1 2013, according to Epsilon's 1Q 2014 Email Trends and Benchmark report. The report revealed that average open rate across all industries was 32.9 percent. However, while open rates are up, average click rates were only 4.3 percent during the corner, which is slightly down from the previous year. In general, over the last couple of years, click rates have been on the decline.

Last fall, Nike sent an email to Florida State's coach Jimbo Fisher asking that his son Ethan wear a different sweatshirt. Nike has a $4.2 million licensing and apparel agreement with Florida State and didn't appreciate that Fisher's son was wearing an Under Armour when he was photographed after a win.

Google has used its email scanning technology to help authorities identify a pedophile. The tech giant used its controversial email scanning technology to identify suspicious images that were being sent from Gmail and then alerted authorities.

StrongView is the leading email marketing vendor, according to a new report from Forrester Research. The Forrester Wave report examined 9 email marketing vendors worth at least $60 million working with enterprise clients. "StrongView joins the rank of Leaders this year for its scalable support for high volume, its dynamic messages and its executive vision, which introduces a plan for using email to enable contextual marketing," Shar VanBoskirk, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester, told ClickZ. "Specifically, it had a strategy focused on utilizing email to play a role beyond driving transactions to establish and enable a series of …

Mozilla has accidentally leaked the email addresses of 76,000 developers on its network. In addition, the browser service has exposed 4,000 encrypted passwords. The company discovered the security issue with the Mozilla Developer Network (MDN) database last week when a developer found that a data sanitization process was failing.

House Republicans have released a series of email from former IRS official Lois Lerner in which she refers to conservative radio hosts and callers as "crazies." The emails have surfaced as part of a scandal investigating whether or not the IRS was targeting conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status, when Lerner was head of the agency that granted such exemptions.

Real estate technology firm Commissions Inc. has tapped email deliverability firm SendGrid to help them scale their growing email mailings and enhance their email infrastructure. The real estate technology platform is designed to connect agents and brokers with home buyers and sellers. The improved email platform helps the company increase its email capability from sending a couple thousand emails a month to tens of millions using a cloud based server.

A police department in Tennessee is collecting the email addresses of businesses in the district in order to send out information updates about the area. Local businesses are encouraged to sign up for the email list in order to receive emails about current law enforcement issues and policy updates in the City of Dickson. Mailchimp will host the email service.

Microsoft Corp has been ordered to turn over a customer's emails to the US government. Despite the fact that the information is stored in a data center in Ireland, a US judge ruled on Thursday that Microsoft must comply with the US government's request. The government provided Microsoft with a search warrant for the emails as part of a criminal investigation.

Email encryption service ProtonMail has plans to introduce a mobile version of its tool very soon. The service is currently developing mobile apps for both iOS and Android devices to help support its growing user base which has reached about 250,000 users. The company, which was developed by CERN particle physicists in Switzerland, was funded by a crowd funding campaign on Indiegogo, in which the company raised almost $600,000.