Nonprofits grew their email lists and along with it the number of online donations they have generated in 2013. However at the same time, open rates and response rates declined last year, according to a new report from M+R Strategic Services. The 2014 M+R Benchmarks Study, looked at the email data for 53 of the largest nonprofits. The research is based on 2.1 billion email messages, 5.6 million donations and 7.5 million online actions.

A Chicago-based doctor at Midwest Orthopaedics at Rush (MOR) had his personal email account hacked into and now the patient data of 1,256 could be at risk. The personal information includes patient names, dates of birth, surgical descriptions or codes, surgical dates, and special surgical instructions. MOR is in the process of updating its privacy policies and plans to eliminate the use of personal email addresses for work purposes.

Two Harvard law school students have created an email service inspired by Snapchat. Like the photo sharing app, Pluto Mail lets people send emails that will expire. The idea is that not everyone wants their digital trail hanging around to haunt them. "When you have a conversation in real life, it doesn't follow you for the rest of your life," explained David Gobaud, one of the founders to The Wall Street Journal. "Sure, there are some business emails or emails related to a contract you might want to keep but most other emails, you want them to go away."

Small businesses are experiencing deliverability problems to Yahoo email addresses after Yahoo updated its email authentication policy this week. Stricter rules around using third-parties has had some marketers reporting bounces. "We are currently experimenting with an anti-abuse technology that helps us protect our users from phishing and spoofing attacks," Yahoo told MarketingLand. "As a result of this experiment, a small percentage of our users who use service providers external to Yahoo may experience issues."

The University of Virginia's Central Mail Service reported technical difficulties last week, and 5,000 users were unable to access their email accounts for more than three days. The university worked to resolve the issue and the accounts that experienced difficulty are back up and running.

Reme.io can is a new app that can help multitaskers stay true to their promises. The app lets the user assign a specific task and then a date and time deadline for the job. Then the app will send the user an email reminder along with a message that the user wrote in advance to complete the task. Users can also schedule the email to go out to multiple users.

Magistrate Judge John Facciola has shot down a new modified proposal from the Justice Department to access a citizen's email address as part of an investigation. The judge said that the warrant did not prove that it is worth violating the citizen's rights by seizing the contents of their entire Apple mail account. "The government is unwilling-for whatever reason-to give up its policy of seizing large quantities of e-mails and other Fourth Amendment protected data even after this Court has repeatedly warned it against doing so," he wrote in a ruling on Monday.

Apple has begun emailing winners of the Worldwide Developers Conference ticket lottery. Those people who won the right to buy tickets should have received an email by now. Apple is also sending rejection emails to those that didn't make the lottery. This is the first year that the company has had to offer up a lottery to sell tickets to the conference. Last year, the event sold out in two minutes when tickets went on sale.

Yahoo has made its email validation policy stricter, as part of an effort to stop spoofing attacks on Yahoo email addresses. However, the new policy is hurting the workflow on legitimate mailing lists. The issue stems from a new DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance) policy for third-parties. The new specification brings about the idea of aligned identifiers, which requires the SPF or DKIM validation domains to be the same as or sub-domains of the domain for the email address in the "from" field.

Deutsche Telekom, Freenet, gmx.de, Kabel Deutschland, Vodafone and web.de have begun informing users whose email addresses and passwords have been stolen. German officials revealed last week that 18 million email addresses and passwords were stolen. The victims are now being told about their exposure. Many of the accounts were being used to send out spam email.