Air Force Lt. Gen. Ronnie Hawkins, director of the Defense Information Systems Agency, thinks that email may be on its way out at the US Defense Department. In an interview with Federal Times, he said that he imagines a more collaborative communications tool for the future, explaining that younger soldiers were raised on text, IM and social media, not email.

Jack Dorsey, the CEO of payments startup Square, has published an email that he sent to employees back in 2012. In the email he condemns employees for name dropping his name saying that it diminishes the employee's authority. "We want more passionate debates about bold and crazy ideas rethinking what we've taken for granted rather than discussions that end in 'John wants this, this is how we're supposed to do it,'" Dorsey he wrote in the email. "The former will keep us agile and innovative, the latter will make us irrelevant." He did not explain why he chose to publish …

Shutterfly has corrected its email mistake with a follow up apology to customers. "We mistakenly sent an email that was intended only for new parents who recently made baby-related purchases at Shutterfly," reads the email. "We're truly sorry if you received this email in error. We realize this is a very sensitive issue and we did not mean to upset you in any way." Earlier this week, the photo printing site sent out a mass email congratulating recipients on their new baby. Many of the recipients did not have a new baby and complained about the mailing on Twitter.

Google has partnered with email data protection company Zix in order to bring email encryption to Google Apps. The privacy is available through a new tool called Google Apps Message Encryption. The tool lets users encrypt emails that are sent to other email systems. Emails sent within Gmail are already encrypted.

Photo-printing website Shutterfly sent out a targeted email blast on Wednesday congratulating recipients on their newborn babies. The email encouraged "new mothers" to design birth announcements and photo books. The problem is that the email went out to the wrong list and was sent to people who did not just have a baby. The company has apologized for the error.

Google is testing a new design for Gmail and it could be a good thing for marketers. Screenshots of the new designs began circulating around the web this week and email marketing experts have been commenting on these images. The cleaner more simplified inbox will allow color images in place of the stars on the left hand side of the inbox. The layout might make it easier for marketers to serve up a compelling image before the consumer even opens an email.

Email marketing services firm Lyris today has released a new tool called Priority Send which allows marketers to circumvent ISPs and land directly into the inboxes of their best customers. Priority Send has an advanced scoring algorithm which allows it to send the first batch of a marketer's emails to their most engaged subscribers. The tool is designed to help marketers avoid spam traps.

As part of its privacy policy, Gmail scans all of the emails that they send and receive in order to serve targeted ads based on the conversations in the emails. This is true not just for Gmail users, but for anyone that is sending and receiving emails from Gmail users.

Unwhiteboard is a new technology that lets users take a photo of a white board and save it digitally. The tool will clean up the image to make it better than a typical cell phone shot. Then users can email themselves the image and avoid having to take notes during a meeting. Users must email the image to please@make.unwhiteboard.com and the service will email a cleaned up version of the notes back to them.

Researchers at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and Raytheon BBN Technologies have come up with a way to make email so secure that even the prying eyes of the NSA couldn't get in. The technology is called digital steganography, and is designed to hide messages within other messages. These hyper-encrypted emails are sent through fiber-optic cables and use light to be revealed. The only way to see the message as it travels through the cables is to use light to detect the photons.