Officials in Melbourne, Australia created ID numbers and email addresses for 70,000 city-owned trees with the hope that citizens would email those trees and report damage and issues for the trees to help make clean up more effective. Instead, city residents wrote fan mail to the trees complimenting them on their beauty.

President Obama is proposing to raise the salary cap for paying overtime workers, many of whom check work email after hours. Under the current rules, workers that make less than $23,660 a year must be paid overtime, but the president would like to raise that to around $50,000. California already has a cap of $50,000, causing many companies to set limits on work email use at home.

SMB software provider Intelliverse has created a Google Chrome plugin for its email tracker app. The tool allows Gmail users to track all of their sent emails. It tracks opens, the device the email was opened on, as well as the geographic location of the recipient when they opened the email. The feature is free for a limited time.

Google has rolled out a new feature that allows users to change the design of their inbox. To access Gmail's new settings and themes, users must click on the cog icon on the right. The drop down will allow users to choose the display density. The Themes tab from the main menu will allow the user to access some of the new themes along with the older versions. There is even the option to add custom images using the My Photos button.

Nashville, Tenn-based Emma email marketing firm Emma has raised $5 million to expand its sales and marketing and develop new products. The round is the first venture capital taken by the firm co-founded by CEO Clint Smith. To date, the 12-year-old company has built a 150-person team representing more than 45,000 clients, al via bootstrapping. Investors include Nashville Capital Network and North Carolina-based Square1 Bank.

People who kvetch the most about inbound email solicitations also happen to be the biggest readers of email marketing messages -- and the best consumers of products and services being pitched -- according to a study of more than 600,000 email account holders conducted by Return Path.

Well, as the headline might suggest, it's this story, literally. The story is about a new predictive email marketing platform being launched by Berlin-based AVARI, which combines real-time predictive algorithms to send the most personally relevant content to an email subscriber. The platform, which AVARI calls "Next Best Content," leverages automation to serve the most relevant content from from a brand's stack to each consumer on their list. Maybe they should have called it "Best Content." I mean, who wants the "next best" anything?

Big marketing data broker Acxiom has relaunched Digital Impact, it's email and cross-channel marketing platform, under the new name Acxiom Impact. Aside from creating a closer brand affinity with the Acxiom name, the reboot includes revamped services aimed at "sophisticated enterprise marketers." Among other things, it provides customers with data integrations from more than 200 partner companies powered by Acxiom's LiveRamp Connect.

Email can be a volatile place for marketers, says EContentMag.com. While it's been around for a while, the old dog of email marketing needs to learn some new tricks. Caught between junk and spam email folders and an increasingly discerning consumer, it is all some advertisers can do just to show up in someone's inbox.

National Institute of Standards and Technology's National Cybersecurity Center of Excellence is inviting the public to comment on two new proposed IT initiatives -- one for email security and one for mobile security. The email security policy suggests using Domain Name System (DNS) based authentication of named entities to help prevent hackers from getting into its system.