Scottrade has agreed Monday to pay $2.6 million to the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority for failing to retain certain categories of outgoing emails, as well as for failing to keep securities-related electronic records in the required format. The company also failed to have a reasonable supervisory system in place for compliance rules, which led to the record-retention issues.

Independent security researcher Yan Zhu has discovered a new bug in Gmail that would allow a spammer to impersonate the email accounts of a legitimate user. The spammer only has to change its display name in the settings on the official Gmail app in order to hide their actual email address. This will make the email look like it is coming from the address that you put in (Zhu tested ""security@google.com"). Google is not fixing the issue, claiming that it has always been able to spoof email envelope addresses, but pointing out that spoofed emails are likely to get caught …

Chipotle's human resources department has been using a domain that they don't own to send autoresponder emails to job applicants. KrebsOnSecurity.com reader Michael Kohlman, a professional IT expert, discovered that chipotlehr.com has never been owned or controlled by the corporation after he applied for a job with the company.

Online investment startup Nutmeg has exposed the personal data of dozens of customers after a glitch in the company's system sent out an email to the wrong list. The email contained names, addresses and investment details of these customers. Nutmeg attributed the issue to the code running its service, which sent out the investment suitability reports to the wrong people.

Almost 70 percent of internet users prefer hearing from brands via email, according to research from Spring Metrics. The research also revealed that the hospitality industry is generating the highest email open rates. While desktop is leading these opens with 93.3 percent of consumers opening emails on desktops, 67.2 percent of consumers check emails on smartphones and by 2017, 2.282 million people will access email on their mobile device, according to the research.

The majority of email marketers (a whopping 95 percent) agree that personalizing emails increases open rates and click-through rates, according to research published by Venture Beat. The study, which includes feedback from 200 email marketing executives, also revealed that 28 percent of marketers are targeting between 2-5 segments, and that 7 percent of marketers are personalizing to the individual level.

In order to deal with overwhelming inboxes and stress, Gabel, a textiles company based in northern Italy, decided to ban internal email at work for one week. Instead, employees relied on in-person meetings. The company's CEO Michele Moltrasio said that employees rediscovered the joys of face-to-face communications. "Even if from next week we all go back to using email, these days of experimentation are very worthwhile, to understand and rethink the methods and pace of working," Moltrasio told the BBC.

Engadget reporter Mat Smith has tested out Gmail's new auto response feature for Inbox. The tool automatically creates short responses to emails, to make it easier for email users to respond to basic emails. "Autoreply works best when the response can be simple: 'Yes, I did that thing you asked', 'No I'm not available Tuesday night,'" he discovered. However, he said the system is not yet great in other languages, and that the responses are so short that he feels rude, since they don't include greetings like "hi", "hey" or "Morning".

Black Pearl Mail is on a mission to make email look better. Inspired by a marketing email from Air New Zealand, the startup's founder Nick Lissette wanted to make everyday email look that good. The tool allows users to create their own letterheads and track recipient engagement through the platform's analytics tools.

"Is email evil," The Atlantic ponders in a new piece published this week. According to the article, over the past 20 years we check a lot more email than we used it and we check it more often: 77 times a day on average. And the more you check email, the worse your mood, likely because it puts you on someone else's timeline. In the end, the article surmises that email isn't evil, we are.