While massive data breaches are a headache for big brands, they are not as costly as they might seem. Benjamin Dean, a fellow at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs. Dean, who also has a background in accounting, looked at large companies that had suffered data breaches including Sony, Home Depot and Target. When comparing the money they spent in lawsuits and fines against their earnings, Dean found that these breaches cost these companies very little.

AnyMeeting is a new tool designed to make scheduling a conference call via email less messy. The tool lets users create a conference call by adding talk@anymeeting.com to an outgoing email. The tool will schedule meetings based on the participant's availability, send out an invite with dial in details and will also send a reminder 15 minutes before the call is scheduled.

Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com, the company that acquired the Indiana-based email marketing firm ExactTarget in 2013, is calling on other tech leaders to avoid doing business in Indiana. The boycott comes in response to Indiana Governor Mike Pence who signed a "religious freedom" bill this week, allowing businesses to refuse service to gays and lesbians for religious reasons. "We firmly believe in the separation of church and state as provisioned in the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States. The [Religious Freedom Restoration Act] clearly blurs that line and opens the door to blatant discrimination," Benioff wrote …

Slack, a startup that goes after email with a chat-based product, has been hacked. The compromised database includes customer usernames, email addresses, phone numbers and Skype IDs. Passwords were also stored on the database, but they were encrypted, so the company says that they will be difficult to access.

Secretary of State John Kerry wants his organization to investigate its procedures for managing employee emails. State Department spokesman Jeff Rathke said that this request is not specifically targeting Hillary Clinton. It comes after Clinton has faced scrutiny for using a private email account and email server while she served for the department.

Harmon.ie, an Israeli-based startup, is merging email with social collaboration for a new workplace communications tool. Rather than focusing just on social feeds, like Yammer, Harmon.ie organizes feeds into digestible messages based on a user's selected topics. The company's founder claims that in doing this, the tool brings the focus that email demands, versus the distraction that social tools create.

A new app called Crystal has launched that is designed to help email users write more empathetic messages. The app taps into your Gmail account and LinkedIn to help analyze the characteristics of your contacts. Using this data as well as available data about people on the web, the app generates personality profiles for your contacts and gives advice on how to communicate with this person based on their type.

The Montana Department of Justice has launched a new service that will notify the public via email if a sex offender moves into their zip code. The email alerts are part of Montana's Sexual or Violent Offender Registry website, a public database that tracks sexual offenders and violent offenders in the state.

Barack Obama's organization Organizing for Action is running a contest, soliciting supporters to share their personal stories in getting involved with his movement, in exchange for the chance to win a trip to DC to meet the president. In an email push to support the campaign, Obama appealed to the comic book lovers in the crowd. "Anyone who reads comics can tell you, every main character has an origin story - the fateful and usually unexpected sequence of events that made them who they are," he wrote in the email.

Facebook revealed new plans for its Messenger application at the F8 developer conference this week. The new platform will enable businesses to send personalized communications to consumers including order confirmations and shipping status updates. These messages are traditionally sent through email. This may offer companies an additional channel to send these communications.