St. Francis Hospital in Columbus, GA sent out a mass email last week exposing the email addresses of everyone on their list. The hospital intended to bcc the email addresses but mistakenly left the address names in the 'to' line of the email leaking the email addresses of 1,175 patients. "St. Francis understands the importance of safeguarding our patients' personal information and takes that responsibility very seriously," explained Pam Burns, the hospital's privacy officer in a statement. "We will continue to do all that we can to work with our patients to help minimize any potential impact of this situation. …

V A Shiva Ayyadurai, the inventor of email, claims that chatting and texting have killed the art of letter writing, but contends that email is the electronic form of letter writing. "Email has explosively supported the growth of letter writing globally," he told NDTV. "Today, unlike some decades ago, where penning letters was limited to a few who could afford education, billions are now writing letters, in electronic form, as never before - albeit, we can argue about the quality of writing - but regardless, more people, than ever before, are participating in the written word."

The Indian state of Madhya Pradesh has become the first state in the nation to give legal status to email correspondence. Last month Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chauhan signed the new law which gives government email communications the same status as postal correspondence.

Celebrity hacker Guccifer has been sentenced to a minimum of four years in jail by a Romanian court. Marcel Lazar Lehel was arrested earlier this year for hacking into the emails of famous people.

Canada's new anti-spam legislation (CASL) will go into effect on July 1, 2014. Under the new rules, a commercial electronic message that promotes a product, person, event, investment or business that is sent to an email address will be required to follow these rules. Email senders that break the new rules will be faced with steep fines.

Executives prefer to hear about trade news via email newsletter, according to a new report from Quartz. Quartz's Global Executive Study, which includes feedback from 1,000 top executives, found that 60 percent of executives use email as the first news source that they check each day. In addition, the research revealed that email newsletters ranks first for industry-specific news as well.

Stanford senior Leah Francis sent out an email to the entire university publicly criticizing the university for how it deals with sexual assault after she was the victim of a rape earlier this year. According to Francis, the punishment that her violator received did not fairly represent the crime. She sent out the mass email in an effort to get the university to improve its policy. Her move comes a week after SnapChat founder Evan Spiegel's sexist email from his frat boy days at Stanford went viral.

The trial for New Mexico Governor Susana Martinez's former campaign manager has been moved up to begin on July 10th instead of July 15th. Jamie Estrada is accused of hijacking the email system of Martinez's political campaign after Martinez took office.

Ninety-three percent of U.S. residents prefer physicians that offer email communication with their patients, according to a survey by Catalyst Healthcare Research. Among those consumers, 25 percent said they would choose a doctor that offers email consultations, even with a $25 charge fee.

Document generation firm Eclipse Corp. has teamed up with cloud-services provider OMI to offer marketers a new way to reach consumers. The partnership brings Eclipse's DocOrigin software and OMI's 366 Degrees communication platform together into one, allowing marketers to integrate campaign content with transactional emails, email notices, texts alerts and direct mail.