Rogers Media, the largest publishing company in Canada, has paid $200,000 to for violating Canada's Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL). The company allegedly sent emails to consumers without providing a viable way to opt out. The legislation came into law July 1, 2014 and since then the government has been investigating complaints submitted to the Spam Reporting Centre.

Small businesses should have already sent their Thanksgiving email marketing messages by now, according to GoDaddy. The company recently analyzed more than one billion emails sent by its small business clients from November 2014 to January 2015 and discovered that emails sent on November 16, the Monday before Thanksgiving week, had open rates that were 14 percent higher than the average daily open rate over the November to December period.

Movie theater chain Cinemark mistakenly sent an email to everyone on its list for a Star Wars premiere at Monaco Pictures, a movie theater in Alabama this week. The email explained that the screening was only for 21+ ages and that all ticketed parties must be of age. But rather than bcc recipients, the theater sent the email to everyone who had purchased tickets to the screening.

Google is getting excited about the new Star Wars movie that is coming out. To celebrate, the company is allowing its users to add Star Wars themes to their Google services including: Gmail, YouTube, search, etc. Users have can access the theme at google.com/starwars.

Consumers spend about three seconds scanning an email and deciding whether or not to read it, according to Movable Ink. The company's Consumer Device Preference report includes analysis for more than 1.3 billion emails sent during Q3 2015. The research also revealed that consumers spend the most time reading emails on PC, 24.6 percent of which lasted for more than 15 seconds.

GoDaddy thinks that brands shouldn't send marketing emails on Thanksgiving Day. The company says that open rates hit their lowest rate on the holiday. Cyber Monday isn't the answer either, as the day is competitive in the inbox. Instead marketers should send in the days surrounding the turkey and shopping holiday.

The Maryland Transportation Authority is warning consumers to beware emails claiming to come from the agency. A spam email is in circulation that is demanding that E-ZPass Maryland customers pay their tolls online. The agency does not send emails to collect payments, they said. The only real emails from the group describe upcoming events, projects or surveys.

TalkTalk business customers have been unable to access their email messages for several days following an outage of one of the telecom's servers this past Friday. The company did not reveal how many customers have been experiencing disruptions or when it will be fixed. The company is advising customers to use a webmail service to retrieve emails in the meantime.

Jason Dooris, the CEO of Sydney-based media agency Atomic 212, has shut down the company's internal email communications system to encourage face-to-face meetings. Dooris said that he hopes to "boost office vibes" among his 58 staffers an encourage creativity. He started in advertising 21 years ago, before mobile phones and email were commonplace.

Hackers broke into the payment systems at Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide, stealing customer credit-card and debit-card information, as well as personal customer profile data during an eight-month long data breach across 54 locations. The company said that malware infected its payment systems at in-hotel restaurants and gift shops. It was not clear how the malware got into the systems. Other large brands have had malware downloaded into their systems when employees interacted with spam emails.