Almost 60 percent of marketers plan to increase their email marketing budgets in 2015, according to a recent report by SalesForce. The research also revealed that email is core to the business for 73 percent or marketers. In fact, 60 percent of marketers surveyed revealed that email "critically enables" their products and services.

Investigators have recovered 32,000 emails that were allegedly lost during the hearings against former IRS head Lois Lerner. The emails were sent during 2011, a period under investigation for after claims arose that the IRS was targeting the Tea Party. The emails were supposedly lost when a hard drive broke, but have been recorded from the IRS' servers. Now investigators must compare these new emails against what they already have surfaced to see if they are different messages.

Emailage, an email vendor dedicated to fraud prevention vendor, has raised $3.8 million in a Series A round of funding. The company uses email addresses to verify user identities and to identify potential fraud. The anti-fraud technology is positioned towards merchants and other marketers who are looking to limit risk.

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo's office is in the process of purging thousands of email messages. The exercise comes after the 90-day email deletion policy was adopted back in June. According to the policy, the government office will automatically delete emails of lower level state workers that are more than three months old.

The Canadian government has been monitoring the email communications of its citizens and participating in a covert surveillance program, similar to the NSA, according to new documents released by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. Canada's Communications Security Establishment has been reading and archiving emails for years.

Hop, an email app for iOS devices that makes email work like IM, has launched on Android devices. The tool is designed to make emails short and to the point, avoiding long winded messages. The app includes the ability to send group communications and to share files via Dropbox.

H&R Block made a big email mistake this week. The tax preparing service sent a email confirmation to the wrong customer. The email included the customer's name, address and security question. The customer that received this private data reported the event to tech blog Ars Technica. The reader expressed consumer that he likely had all of the information needed to steal the customer's entire tax return, highlighting the security flaw in the system.

Lenovo's website and email system has been hacked into. The cyber criminals have been able to intercept the computer company's emails and Web pages. The hijacker was able to compromise Lenovo's domain registrar Web Commerce Communications, and change the IP address used when customers try to visit Lenovo.com into their Web browsers or email applications. Lenovo is working to restore control of its email and website.

Wendy Boswell, a professor at Texas A&M University's Mays Business School, and her research partner, Marcus Butts, have identified what they are calling "a new night shift," as workers are checking email after work. The two researchers interviewed 341 working adults across a seven-day period. The research found that 21 percent of emails sent after work came from supervisors, 41 percent came from coworkers, 16 percent from subordinates and 22 percent came from clients. All of this after work email is not necessarily a bad thing. If it includes praise, it didn't bother the recipients. If it was negative, not …

Professional networking site Conspire has expanded its offering to support IMAP-supported email accounts. Prior to this expansion, the company only supported Gmail and Google Apps email. The crowd-sourced professional network helps create a virtual network for users by taking their email data such as headers, subject lines, as well as the To, From and CC columns.