Facebook has joined the ranks of companies looking to do away with email in the workplace. The social networking giant has released a new collaboration tool for businesses called Facebook At Work that facilitates communications through Facebook rather than through email. The tool, which is currently in beta looks similar to the general Facebook platform but there are no ads and the company doesn't track users.

British telecommunications company BT is the victim of a phishing email scam. Spam messages claiming to be from the company are in circulation. The emails claim that the customer's on-file credit card is not working and asks the user to update their account on a malicious page.

Apple's OS X Mail platform has a loophole that exposes user behavior of email users that think that they are using privacy settings. Essentially if the user uses Spotlight to search through email messages, the preview pane loads the email and automatically renders any images embedded in the emails. This automatically sends click through data back to the sender, even if the consumer has set up privacy blocking software to keep their activity private.

President Barack Obama is calling for stricter rules about how the personal data of consumers is managed. Obama wants to push through legislation that would require companies to tell consumers within 30 days of a data breach. The president called hacks a "direct threat to the economic security" of Americans.

Frontier Communications, a provider of phone and data services, is among companies that are rethinking the use of email in the workplace after Sony's massive data breach. The company has adopted a new policy when employees are working on sensitive issues: use the phone or schedule a face-to-face-meeting.

Spanish police have detained 11 people as part of a criminal investigation into a potential terrorist threat, and one of the charges they are being accused of is using encrypted email. The police claim that the suspects used RiseUp.net's servers to send "emails with extreme security measures." Civil liberties groups have criticized the judge's move to "criminalise people for using privacy tools."

Hackers have used spam email to attack a real world target. Late last year, a spear-phishing attack gave criminals access to the server in a German steel mill. The attackers were able to turn on a furnace which caused a fire at the facility. German officials are now investigating the attack to get more answers.

The email accounts for workers in the town of Modesto, CA were shut down thanks to a malware attack. One of the town's employees opened a spam email, triggering a malware attack on the town's servers. The attack was designed to collect data such as user names and passwords. After the attack, the city shut down its email for a couple of hours in order to fix the problem. The town's Information Technology Manager Kevin Harless said that no official data left the servers.

Mixmax, a new Chrome extension for Gmail, is designed to improve email for users. The tool allows users to send interactive polls within the Gmail interface to help minimize back and forth emails. For example, a user that is scheduling a meeting can send out a poll to check availability without having to receive a number of back and forth emails that can clutter the inbox.

Microsoft has added a new feature to Outlook.com that makes it easier for users to save email attachments directly to the cloud. The Save to OneDrive feature, lets users opt to save their email attachments to a folder called Email attachments in their Microsoft cloud account. Google already offers a similar option for Gmail users.