Canadian Internet carrier Northwestel is working to fix an internet usage alert system after some customers complained they the had received emails saying that their Internet usage was almost at its limit. The provider reported that its system sent those emails incorrectly and is working to address the problem.

Oakland Mayor Jean Quan has been criticized for sending campaign emails to city employees at their official city accounts, an unethical practice. In response, her team has vowed to clean up their email distribution lists and ensure that these people are no longer on the list. This includes scrubbing the list for .gov email addresses.

Dmitry Grishin, the chairman and CEO of Mail.ru, Russia's new email provider thinks that email is thriving globally and he only expects it to grow. In fact, in an interview with Quartz.com, Grishin said that the massive adoption of smartphones around the globe means that more people will be signing up for email accounts. He said that he email on mobile is starting to resemble instant messaging.

Analytics leads the charge for brands looking to upgrade their email marketing software, according to David M. Raab is a consultant specializing in marketing technology and analytics and author of the B2B Marketing Automation Vendor Selection Tool (VEST). In his latest research, Raab found that when marketers are looking to upgrade their email marketing software, campaign, content and CRM management tools also made the list for features that they needed to upgrade.

Checking work email after hours is not necessarily more stressful for workers, according to a new report from research firm Gallup. The organization has been investigating whether or not bans on email after work hours is truly effective, and found the situation not to be so cut and dry. In fact, a third of full-time workers report frequently checking email outside normal working hours, and 17 percent of those people also report better overall lives than those people who never check email outside work. In addition, workers who spend seven or more hours checking their email outside work hours also …

Purchases driven by emails that were opened on a mobile device has grown almost 40 percent over the past year, according to a new report from Yesmail. However, the revenue generated from these transactions hasn't grown at the same pace. The Email Marketing Compass report looked at email transactions from Q2 2013 through Q2 2014 and found that mobile orders triggered by emails made up 22 percent of all orders in the second quarter of 2014, up from 16 percent one year ago. However, the average order value of transactions on mobile devices made from an email has declined 30 …

Some news sites including Buzzfeed and The Atlantic have proposed adding a like button to emails and the reality is, it wouldn't be so hard to do. According to Pete Resnick, one of the directors at the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), the engineering standards group that manages email, a like button for email is "perfectly plausible." Using an RFC 3798 extension, when an email user 'liked' an email, then an auto trigger could send out an email to everyone else on the thread.

Seventy-four percent of marketers use open rates as their primary success metric for their email marketing messages, according to a new report from Lionbridge Technology. The 2014 Global Email Survey also revealed that some marketers may be over emailing consumers. "We [found] that even when one department thinks they 'own' email marketing, they are often surprised to find that several other business functions are blasting out messages to the same list based on their own schedules and objectives," explained the report.

Last week Google added support for non-Latin characters in Gmail email addresses. Scammers are now trying to take advantage of this new option with spammy email addresses that employ non-Latin characters. Google has flagged the issue and is now filtering email messages on a Unicode standard, so as to avoid delivering spam messages.

The U.S. Department of Justice has requested that a New York court vacate a stay on an order that would force Microsoft to had over emails held abroad to the US government. Microsoft had appealed the order, claiming that the emails were not subject to US governing since they were held on a server abroad, and that handing them over would violate the company's privacy policy. However, Judge Loretta Preska of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York rejected this appeal.