Retailers are not doing a good enough job at responding to customer service complaints via email. In fact, according to Eptica's 2015 Multichannel Customer Experience Study, companies take an average of 44 hours to respond to a customer concern submitted via email. This is 8 hours longer than it took on average in 2014. Social media is much more effective. Most companies respond to tweets in an average of 4 hours and 5 minutes, which has improved a lot since 2014 when the average response time was 13 hours and 10 minutes.

Wrte.io is a new service, available in beta, that lets email users get paid to receive an email. Users must sign up for an account and then share their email address. When someone unknown tries to email the address, they are asked to pay. The user can set the price beginning at $.99. The email will be forwarded to the user along with the payment.

Timing is everything when it comes to using data to make marketing messages more effective, according to Kerry Reilly, director of product marketing at Adobe Campaign. "If you're a brand new customer, we're going to talk to you differently than if we're talking to [another customer] and she's a loyal, frequent shopper," said Reilly in an interview with Direct Marketing News. "So [it's] understanding the recency, frequency, monetary [value]. It's very traditional. But the new stuff is bringing in context-aware information."

California has does not have any policy about how public officials should use email to conduct official government business. The state is one of many that don't have these rules. Advocates warn that this lack of policy could lead public officials to hide certain emails from public scrutiny.

Fake emails claiming to come from the IRS are in circulation. The emails claim to help recipients "use a new online service that helps people who receive Social Security benefits and Medicare have the information they need to file their tax returns." These emails are fake and link to a malware site.

SlideMail is a new email app designed to help email users organize their inboxes while sorting through messages. The app joins a busy marketplace for email management apps, but differentiates itself by not focusing on a "priority inbox." Instead SildeMail analyzes text to categorize different types of emails such as receipts, newsletters, personal emails and appointments, so as to help a user better navigate their inbox.

Developer Sonny Tulyaganov was not pleased to hear about tools like Yeswear, Bananatag, and Streak, which allow email senders to track the behaviors of email recipients via a Chrome extension. So he wrote some code to fight back. Ugly Mail allows an email user to see when an email-tracking service has been added to an email they receive, so that they can decide whether or not to open it.

Underscores and cute names are a turnoff to recruiters looking at your email address, according to new research from the Department of Social and Organisational Psychology at VU University, Amsterdam. The researchers created six fictional resumes with different kinds of email addresses and then had 73 recruiters aged 20 to 65 fill out an online survey analyzing the cognitive ability, personality and hirability of all six applicants. The researchers included some spelling errors and some funny email addresses. Despite having no spelling errors, the people with less formal email addresses were less attractive to the recruiters.

Emails sent on Saturdays have the highest overall open rate, averaging at 18.3 percent, according to research from Customer.io. Tuesday follows Saturdays at a close second with an average email open rates reaching 18 percent that day. The idea is that Saturday, people are not working so they have more time for email, and Tuesday they are busily into their work week and most efficient.

Mandrill, a transactional email service available to small businesses through MailChimp, has issued a warning to customers that some of its email data could have been exposed in a bonnet attack. According to Mandrill, the company experienced an attack after changing its firewall and the attackers tried to lasso some of Mandrill's servers into a bonnet. The Rocket Science Group, Mandrill's parent company, has not identified any evidence of stolen data but said that internal logs such as emails sent, sender and recipient addresses could have been exposed. However, custom metadata and message content is not at risk.