Answering work emails and text messages after hours may seem like a way to get ahead at work, but it can actually hurt performance, says psychology professor Larissa Barber. In a recent survey, Barber discovered that 81 percent of workers say they have checked work email on the weekend and a third of workers respond to work emails within 15 minutes. This response to what she calls "telepressure" can lead to employees feeling burned out and unfocused, which can lead to doing a poor job.

Thanksgiving Day is not the best day this week to send out an email or social media campaign, according to a new report from Yesmail Interactive. The digital services firm compared the social and email campaigns of 50 major retailers during the last two holiday seasons and found that campaigns sent the day before Thanksgiving saw 57 percent higher engagement than other days of the week.

The Australian government has plans to shop for a new government email platform in late 2015 or 2016, after the organization establishes a cloud services panel. The government said that by creating a cloud platform they will be help agencies to focus more on core activities. The group is currently working on a scoping study on called GovDesk and GovMail, which will help government agencies establish automation services for a subscription price.

Online giant Rakuten acquired the shopping & package tracking app Slice at the beginning of this year, and now Slice has made its own acquisition. The app company has purchased Unroll.Me, the service that allows users to mass unsubscribe from email marketing messages in a deal whose terms were not disclosed. According to TechCrunch, the email management app has 1.3 million users.

Yahoo has apologized for an outage in its email service. Some users had their accounts disrupted last week after an underwater fiber cable was accidentally cut. The tech giant blamed the issue on a third party and has reported that its engineering team has "rerouted email traffic to mitigate accessibility issues."

The IRS has recovered more than 30,000 emails that were supposedly "lost." The emails were requested as part of a congressional inquiry which claimed that the agency targeted conservative groups. Investigators for the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration recovered the missing emails from IRS backup tapes.

Discovery site Product Hunt helps users discover the best in apps, books and startups based on community feedback. Every day, the site sends out an email with a roundup of the top voted products from the previous day. The site is growing this email list quickly. As of September, the site has more than 70,000 email subscribers.

The majority of retailers are not taking advantage of personalization when it comes to email marketing, according to a new study from e-commerce services firm OrderDynamics. The research found that seventy-four percent of retailers send emails featuring irrelevant products to customers despite the fact that they may have added an item to their shopping cart. For instance, one apparel retailer studied in the report sent emails pushing women's sweaters to a customer that saved men's fleecewear the shopping cart. The report also revealed that only 33 percent of retailers are following up with shoppers via email after the customer has …

Email will be the workhorse for marketers this holiday season, according to a new report from Experian Marketing Services. The research, which included feedback from 379 global marketers who plan to run holiday-specific campaigns, found that 91 percent of marketers will use email to promote holiday campaigns. Only 76 percent of marketers said they'd use their websites to do so and only 70 percent of marketers said that they would use social media.

Both Democrat and Republican senators on the Senate intelligence committee do not approve of the CIA's new proposal to destroy every email except for 22 top ranking officials. Senator Dianne Feinstein (D., Calif.) and Saxby Chambliss (R., Ga.) wrote a letter expressing their concern saying that emails help find CIA records and therefore should be retained.