A Texas school district has shared its email list of parents with two political groups who are campaigning for an upcoming bond election. The Katy ISD school accidentally gave out the list of about 8,000 email addresses to both the democratic and Republican supported PAC involved in the upcoming election. Parents were outraged by the privacy breach, having only shared their contact information to get updates about the school. The school apologized for what it called a clerical error and has asked both PACs to stop sending to the list.

British cell phone retailer Phones 4U can't seem to do anything right. The company recently lost all of its wireless partners and revealed has plans to shut down operation. This news came after allowing customers to preorder the iPhone 6. Now, the company has sent out an email telling customers that they would not get an iPhone 6, nor would they be getting a refund for their purchase. And to make things worse, the company didn't bcc customer contacts and revealed all of the customer's addresses in the note. Angry customers have been on the rampage replying to all. Phones …

Email marketing startup firm Sendwithus has raised $2.3 million in seed funding through Y Combinator. This is the second round of funding that the company has generated. The business is focused on supplying tools for marketers to A/B test transactional emails.

The FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) has issued a warning about an email spam threat which claims to be from the organization. The email tells recipients that they are being investigated for criminal behavior and that they have 1-2 days to respond before an arrest warrant is issued. Consumers that have responded to this email are asked to send money via prepaid cards in order to avoid punishment.

Argentine based El Mejor Trato has banned internal email at work which has resulted in faster responses to email exchanges with people outside of the company. The company's CEO Cristian Rennella told Fast Company that the move has decluttered his inbox and that he now only sees about five emails in his inbox a day. He claims that without being bogged down by crowded inboxes, his workers are more productive and are able to get their work done in four 8-hour days a week.

Gordon Mangione, CEO of TipBit, an email app for Microsoft Exchange, IMAP and Gmail, doesn't think that email is going anywhere. In an interview with Forbes, the tech executive said that despite claims that "email is dead," email is alive and well. He gave three main reasons for why email will stick around: 1) Email is an open standard. 2) The Web is addicted. 3) Privacy concerns.

Salesforce.com has revealed hopes to build a tower in Indianapolis, Indiana, the home of its email services platform ExactTarget. The tower would be the fifth for the company, as it already has four towers in cities around the globe including: London, Paris, Tokyo and San Francisco. Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of Salesforce.com, revealed the news this week at Connections 2014, ExactTarget's annual conference in Indianapolis. He said that the tower will be built if the right opportunity presents itself.

Yahoo has acquired an Indian startup called Bookpad in a deal whose terms were not disclosed. The company makes an online file-editing service called Docspad and Yahoo will use the company to help improve access to documents within Yahoo Mail. Docspad, which works on desktops and mobile devices, allows users to view, create and edit files from within their apps including Yahoo Mail.

India's Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DeitY) is working to build an in-house email platform that is designed to bring more security to government communications. The new email interface has been designed to work similarly to Gmail and Yahoo to make it user-friendly. On the back end the system us designed to keep data secure. The platform will roll out to the Central Indian government, then to state governments. In the future, the system will be open to Indian citizens to interact with the government.

Tocomail for Gmail wants to make email fun and safe for kids. The email client for Gmail allows parents to add security controls in order to monitor who their children communicate with. The company has two different apps -- one for small children and one geared for teens -- Tocomail is designed for teens and Tocomail Safe Email for Kids is for younger children.