Several retail chains including, CVS, Costco and Sam's Club have shut down their online photo printing sites after a data breach at PNI Digital Media, a third-party vendor that manages the services. The retailers found out last week that their customer data may have been exposed and that customer's personal information such as email address and credit card numbers might have been vulnerable to theft.

British telecom Virgin Media is shutting down its email service temporarily while it builds an in-house system after Google pulled the plug on Gmail for ISPs. The company had used Gmail since 2009 to support its email account holders, but now is seeking an alternative. The company said it plans to migrate to a new server soon.

Russian hackers have broken into the Pentagon's email platform and sent emails to Department of Defense employees claiming to come from the nonprofit National Endowment for Democracy. The spam messages include malware and were sent from an infected server. So far around five employees have been victims of the scam and downloaded viruses onto their computers.

Watsi, a global funding platform for medical treatments that aims to bring a tech startup approach to the non-profit world, has found that email plays a large role in generating donations. First Round recently published a paper called, What Startups Can Learn from Watsi's Wildly Successful Email Campaign, which reveals how the non-profit used strong email content to engage donors. By highlighting personal stories of how they helped individual patients in the email, the non-profit increased donations.

The secretary of homeland security, and 28 of his senior staffers use private email accounts from work computers to do official work. Cybersecurity experts and government transparency advocates have criticized the behavior especially since using private emails on work computers was banned in April 2014. The officials have gotten around the rules by obtaining informal waivers which claim that the practice protects national security.

Ashley Madison, an online adult site which endorses infidelity, has been hacked. The company has warned its 37 million members that hackers have broken into its database and obtained personal information including member name, contact info and credit card transactions. "We apologise for this unprovoked and criminal intrusion into our customers' information," the owners said in a statement.

Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, is not a fan of Gmail's spam filtering. Earlier this week, Torvalds was not seeing many of his emails and found that Gmail had delegated hundreds of legitimate email messages sent to him to his spam folder. In fact, more than 30 percent of his spam folder had legitimate email.

Google will now allow Gmail users to create custom email addresses such as you@yourcompanyname.com for $2 a month. For users that would like a more work oriented email address, Google also supports Google for Work services in which a user can choose their own custom email address and add 30 GB of storage for $5 a month.

Google has updated Inbox by Gmail and launched a new snooze feature. The tool lets email users hit snooze on an email and then schedule the time that they'd like to read it. So rather than it just popping up several days after hitting snooze, email users can be more strategic about when it pops up again.

Several officials in the City of Detroit, including Mayor Mike Duggan, have been caught using personal email accounts to conduct official business. Detroit Free Press caught these officials after filing a Freedom of Information Act request into the email exchanges between officials. The request revealed that officials used Gmail accounts to negotiate land deals.