White House Office of Science and Technology Policy Director John Holdren, who warned co-workers not to use personal email accounts to conduct government business, has been accused of doing just that. An environmental advocacy group the Competitive Enterprise Institute is accusing Holdren of using an old email address to conduct business in order to evade transparency.

Rachel Sklar, a lawyer-turned tech reporter, has caused a Twitter sensation from a single email. After being enraged by the gender gap in the tech business, as documented by a New York magazine article, she sent out an email to 20 women encouraging them to fight the injustice with the hashtag #changetheratio. The campaign took off on Twitter and reached women beyond the tech sector.

Late last week, the White House released its latest big data report. While the report recommends a closer look at how marketers are using big data, the report does encourage self-regulation among marketers. "One of the things DMA was happy to see highlighted in the White House report was the power of self-regulation," Rachel Thomas, VP of government affairs, DMA, told Direct Marketing News. "A federal law may be unlikely to pass, but it isn't necessary to make sure consumers are protected properly. DMA members work every day to make sure data is used responsibly. We'll continue to do that …

The White House has reviewed big data practices in business and is calling for an update to privacy laws. As part of the report, the Obama administration is recommending update to the 1986 rules that allow law enforcement to access emails without a warrant. In addition, the organization is calling to create a law requiring companies to notify consumers when data breaches occur.

Bell and Howell has teamed up with Experian Marketing Services for list hygiene and customer acquisition services. The company will use Experian tools to mange its database. In addition, the company will have list rental capabilities through Experian's Go Data tool.

Brazilians are getting bombarded by emails from Walmart Brasil. In fact, according to a new report from online security firm Cloudmark, nine out of 10 marketing emails sent to Brazilians from the company was marked as spam by the recipient. Walmart is not alone in overspending in Brazil. The country has no spam restrictions, so marketers often over send in the country, according to the report.

Almost 60 percent of marketers plan to increase their spending on untargeted email marketing and display advertisements in 2014, according to a new report from Forrester Research. The report revealed that marketers will send out a record 258 billion emails this year. Despite the fact that marketers have better access to data than ever, only 11 percent of Fortune 1000 companies will use it to support their campaigns.

Yahoo! has pulled its email platform from Iran, and will no longer allow people living in the country to create new email accounts. The move comes as Iran is facing a number of sanctions from the U.S. However, free email accounts are exempt from these laws set out by The State Department. This is a large blow to the country, in which more than 63 percent of the Internet population uses Yahoo as their primary email provider.

Data automation is allowing marketers to send event-triggered tailored emails. Direct Marketing News explored the trend in a feature story in this month's issues, exploring how predictive marketing makes for the most successful triggers. However, according to the article, the many marketers are not using automated emails as best they can. "Overall, email triggers are underused," Ellie Mirman, inbound marketing funnel manager at HubSpot told Direct Marketing News.

Consumers that use @me.com, @mac.com or @icloud.com services for email may not be getting emails from marketers that use a "mail merge" service, such as Constant Contact, Direct Mail, MaxBulk Mailer, MailChimp or Sailthru. These marketers are not getting bounces either, the emails are simply disappearing. This issue is only impacting HTML emails, plaintext emails are not having this same deliverability problem.