Spam emails claiming to be Facebook are in circulation. The emails claim that the social network user's password has been changed after suspicious activity was noticed on their account. The message includes a link back to a malware site that is designed to look like Facebook.

Web app WiseStamp has added support for Inbox by Gmail. The free tool allows Inbox users to add a signature to messages. To do so, a user has to install the extension and set up the autofill signature.

The police department in Oakland, CA experienced an email outage on Saturday, leaving the entire force without email for the entire day. City officials revealed that an internal system hardware failed on one of the city's email servers leading to the shutdown. The email service has since been restored.

As the year is wrapping up, Direct Marketing News has rounded up some interesting email facts to think about for the new year. For instance, 73 percent of consumers use their mobile phone to access one or more email accounts, according to a new report from The Relevancy Group and Liveclicker. The news site also points out the Message Systems stat that twenty five percent of consumers claim that email is their favorite for marketing channel. In addition, Campaigner's research reveals that more than 60 percent of executives said that email marketing is their leading producer of ROI.

Oracle, the company that owns the email marketing services firm Responsys, has entered into an agreement to buy Datalogix, a firm that helps marketers connect offline and online consumer spending data. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. Datalogix will be integrated with Oracle's cloud product.

Internet service provider Mediacom experienced ethnical difficulties over the weekend, leaving many customers without access to their email accounts. The company revealed that problem on its website on Saturday and has since restored service to its webmail customers. However, the ISP is still working on fixing some other technical issues.

Brands including Home Depot, Walmart, Target and Costco have been spoofed in spam emails landing in consumer inboxes this holiday season. This year scammers have been taking advantage of the trust put in transactional emails and spam messages have been coming in the form of email confirmations. These emails solicit the user to confirm an order by clicking on a malicious link.

Mark Cuban, the owner of the NBA's Dallas Mavericks, thinks that there is a lesson in Sony's email scandal: Don't use email. He doesn't use email himself and he discourages his players and other members of the organization not to use the channel. "When you send a text or email (you) lose ownership of the message but not responsibility," Cuban told For the Win. "Any email or text you have ever sent -- even the most innocent or benign -- could be forwarded, posted on social media, or shown to someone out of context."

Twenty-five percent of shoppers revealed that email is their favorite marketing channel, according to a new report from Message Systems. Email led the pack against mobile which only 9 percent of shoppers preferred and social which only 5 percent prefer. In the new year, expect to see more hashtags in subject lines, as well as more real-tome personalization and responsive design. Expect to see less batch and blast campaigns and less static emails.

After the major PR hit experienced by Sony as its leaked emails have been published all over online, Hollywood executives are rethinking how the conduct business. Not wanting to have their private interactions end up as front page news, film executives surveyed by The Hollywood Reporter have revealed that they are looking for better ways to connect that won't leave a trail. In the meantime, executives are trying to clean up their existing email footprints.