California Representative Mike Honda is under investigation for allowing his reelection campaigners to promote their message during official government events and business hours. Honda's office have denied the allegations but new emails have surfaced reveal that a campaigner used her private email account to work on Honda's campaign while she was on the clock and should have been working on official state business.

A startup called front has just raised $3.1 million from a great group of SaaS investors, for a new email-based service that acts like a reception desk for small companies. The platform will accept any emails sent to email addresses such as contact@ or info@ a company and allows employees to process these emails in a task management tool. Team members can assign the communications to each other to follow up on.

Vanishh Pro, a new email security tool that is designed to auto delete email messages from a sender's account after a set amount of time, may not be as secure as it promises. The tool, which only works with Gmail, is slightly flawed as TUAW points out. In order for the service to work, the receiver of the email also has to install the app. If not, the email will not be deleted.

The Pennsylvania Attorney General's office has come into hot water for their abuse of their government email accounts. At least 38 current and former employees of the office have been caught sending or receiving pornographic images from the work email accounts. A former spokesman for Governor Tom Corbett is among the officials that used email to send hundreds of explicit videos and photos from state email accounts between 2008 and 2012.

Email is still the primary communications tool for government officials in Asis, according to a new report from FutureGov Asia. The "Government Connectivity, Citizen Engagement and Economic Impact in Asia Pacific" report, which was commissioned by Cisco Systems, included input from 100 senior officials in Australia, Malaysia, India and Singapore. According to the report, 92.5 percent use email as their main mode of digital communications. Eighty-seven and a half percent reported using "The Internet" and 85.5 percent use the "Intranet." Only 57 percent reported using social media for work communications.

Cloud Storage app OneBox allows email users to save attachments that they have gotten from multiple email accounts into their cloud storage platform of choice. A user can save these files, then reattach them to outbound emails by accessing their cloud account. The app supports integration with Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive and Box for storage and Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo Mail, Microsoft Exchange and IMAP-based email for email. Files can include anything from a document to a video.

German-based secure email provider Lavaboom is accepting Bitcoin as a payment method for its service. While the first-tier version of the encrypted email platform is free, for those users that want an extra level of services from the two-factor authentication platform can pay in Bitcoin and keep their identity secret.

Respond immediately and keep your inbox clean, are among the tips that Google's CEO Eric Schmidt has for email users. Schmidt revealed these insights in a new book called How Google Works. His other advice includes using crisp sharp language; thinking carefully about why you are using a bcc and not avoids all caps and "yelling" at the recipient.

As the Indian government goes forward with its plans to ban the use of consumer email services like Yahoo and Gmail for official business, more than five million officials will be up and running on the government's new secure email platform by March 2015. The move comes after revelations of spying by the U.S. government, which prompted the country's government to rethink its communications plan and build out a secure email platform in-house.

There will be 4.9 billion email accounts by 2017, an increase from 3.9 billion accounts in 2013, according to data from The Radicati Group. Consumer email accounts made up 76 percent of all email addresses in 2013 and that number will rise steadily in the coming years. The research company also predicts that business email accounts will reach 1.1 billion by the end of 2017, up from 929 million in 2013.