Viacom has launched a new email system that will automatically delete emails from employee inboxes every 30 days. The idea is to avoid a major scandal in the event that their databases are hacked into, as Sony was last year. Employees are now having to organize their emails and save any data they want to hold onto in the long run.

The University of Michigan's email system, which is used by both students and staff members, has been hacked into. The university revealed the breach on its website on Thursday, explaining that one of its users fell victim to a phishing email this week. The people that clicked on the scam emails exposed their names, dates of birth, Social Security numbers and passwords.

Yahoo is killing a bunch of underused products and as part of the overhaul, Yahoo Mail is no longer going to work on older iOS devices. The app will no longer sync with Apple Mail app on iOS 4 and older devices. In addition, Yahoo Contacts will no longer sync with Macs running OS X 10.7 Lion and earlier. The company is also scaling back its maps product.

The U.S. government has reported that the Federal Office of Personnel Management and the Interior Department were hit with a massive data breach, which exposed the records of four million government officials. The hack occurred in December but wasn't discovered until April.

The United States has accused China of a massive data breach that exposed the personal information of more than four million federal employees. China has called the accusations "groundless" and "irresponsible".

Google has updated how it sends Google+ notifications. Users can now access these social messages through Gmail, Google Calendar, YouTube, and the Google homepage. In addition, the Google+ search results will now appear as "Google notifications" instead of "Google+ notifications."

Mark Dixon, a city engineer for the Department of Environmental Protection in New York, has been suspended for two days after he used his work laptop to check an unrelated email account. Dixon, also an adjunct professor at SUNY Ulster, checked his SUNY email, during his lunch breaks at the DEP. The Conflicts of Interest Board found a conflict with this use and suspended Dixon without pay for two days.

Forty-nine percent of marketers said that branding is their top concern, according to a new report from Experian Marketing Services. While last year 61 percent of respondents said that data management was their most significant challenge, this year only 36 percent of the respondents this year find it to be their greatest concern.

Justin Kwan, a second-year analyst at Barclays' global power and utilities group, has caused a stir by sending an overbearing email out to interns introducing "10 Power Commandments." The email, with the subject line "Welcome to the Jungle," says that interns must live and die by these rules which includes being the last ones to leave work and bringing a yoga mat to work for those instances they have to sleep at the office.

Bloomberg reporter Rebecca Greenfield thinks that signing emails with "best" is wrong. Yet, according to a survey that she did 75 percent of people use "best" or "thanks," a huge increase since 2003, when a University of Pennsylvania study found that only 5 percent use "best" to close an email. She argues that email has become some ubiquitous and that digital communications are so informal that there is no need for a sign off since a sign off is a remnant of a written letter.