The user records for about 1.1 million customers of the health insurance provider CareFirst have been stolen. The data includes names, birth dates, email addresses and member ID numbers. The company realized that the data was stolen when doing a security refresh. The information was stolen in June 2014.

The State Department is planning to release the first round of emails that were taken from Hillary Clinton's private email server in the coming days. Initially the department suggested a release date of January 15, 2016, but a federal judge denied the request and said they need to come out soon. The emails have already been turned over to the special House committee which is investigating the 2012 attacks on the United States outposts in Benghazi.

A Nigerian man based in Newark, NJ has been sentenced to three years in prison for running a $1 million "phishing" scam. In addition, Abiodun Adejohn was ordered to pay more than $630,000 in restitution. Adejohn has been in custody since Sept. 2013, and had previously pleaded guilty wire fraud conspiracy.

Herman Cain, the former CEO of Godfather's Pizza that ran for president in 2012, has rented his email list to a religious extremist named Nathan Shepard. The self-proclaimed "Bible scholar" who is in training "for the worst disaster in human history" sent out an email this week claiming that President Obama is secretly leading the United States toward the apocalypse.

Phil Libin, CEO of the organizational app Evernote, thinks that zombie movies are so popular because our email-centric culture can relate. He says that managing an email inbox is like fighting off zombies. In an interview with The Guardian he said, "The individual zombie isn't actually that scary, and you can plan around them and kill a bunch of them and feel like you're making progress. But you also have this sense that at some point, you're going to get overwhelmed." He thinks that tools like Slack help fight the problem.

Microsoft is working on a new email app that is designed to facilitate quick email conversations on mobile devices. The app is called Flow and will support Outlook. A Twitter user discovered that the new app is in development on the company's site in a page marked "Microsoft Confidential." The page included a download with more details on the project.

We've seen several studies that suggest that after hours email is bad for your health and productivity, but can you sue your boss for expecting you to respond to late night emails? This is a question that is being raised as several lawsuits are alleging that companies are expecting employees to work unpaid hours on work devices like iPhones. While only a couple of lawsuits like this are going on, some attorneys suggest that judges are sympathetic to these suits and suggest that there may be changes to federal labor regulations.

Eighty-four percent of marketers consider email important or critically important to customer loyalty, according to a new report from Venture Beat. In addition, most marketers report that email is important for sales, customer retention and lead generation. However, despite the channel's importance, only 50 percent of email marketers consider their needs met by their current providers.

Standard General LP, a hedge fund that acquired 1,743 RadioShack stores and its inventory earlier this year, won the company's intellectual property at auction last week. The property includes the retailer's customer names, email addresses and mailing addresses. Today a judge will determine if this information is legal to sell and if so what the terms will be. The FTC has argued that selling this data violates RadioShack's privacy promises that the company had made to customers.

Retailers can take up to 197 days to detect a data breach, according to a new report from the Ponemon Institute on behalf of Arbor Networks. The research found that this scammers are able to steal ample amounts of consumer data within this amount of time frame. Despite this situation 71 percent of retailers said they are "not optimistic" about their firms' ability to improve these results in the coming year.