Cyrus Innovation has created a new browser extension for Chrome that will help women edit their own emails for self-demeaning phrases. Women can use the app to find phrases like "I'm no expert" and words such as "just," "I think," and "sorry," which are often used to undermine authority and dilute their leadership capacity.

Google's Calendar, Inbox by Gmail, and Google Keep apps work together to help create a full service productivity suite. Inbox by Gmail allow users to turn emails into task lists, and couple with the reminders of Google Calendar and the notes you can save in Google Keep, the suite can help increase organization and productivity.

Yahoo is implementing a new policy to alert Yahoo Mail users if it appears they are being spied on by governments. "Yahoo will now notify you if we strongly suspect that your account may have been targeted by a state-sponsored actor. We'll provide these specific notifications so that our users can take appropriate measures to protect their accounts and devices in light of these sophisticated attacks," wrote Bob Lord, Yahoo's chief information officer, in a blog post.

Microsoft will begin warning Outlook.com email users if the company thinks that any government has been trying to access their accounts. The Redmond-based giant is following in the steps of Google and Facebook who offer similar policies. The move comes after scrutiny over a hacking campaign that had targeted international leaders of China's Tibetan and Uighur minorities, that Microsoft did not disclose to users.

Infidelity site Ashley Madison claims that it has grown its membership since its massive data breach this past summer. In July the company warned its 37 million members that hackers broke into its database and obtained personal information including member name, contact info and credit card transactions. Despite the lawsuits and bad press that followed, the site is claiming that its business is growing.

A misconfigured database of voter registration data exposed the personal data of 191 million U.S. citizens who are registered to vote. Researcher Chris Vickery, discovered the vulnerability. It is not clear which data was exposed but it could include: voter's name, date of birth, gender, and address, ethnicity, party affiliation, email address, phone number and state voter ID.

The University of Connecticut's website and email system has been hacked. Officials are investigating the attack which took place over the weekend. Spam emails have been sent out from the system with links to to download malicious software. The vulnerability has been patched as the school continues to seek answers on how it happened.

Subscription fashion site Birchbox has some work to do to improve the data on its email program. Direct Marketing News subscribed to its service but the email stream didn't align. While the company sent a welcome email and offered several promo codes to the subscriber, they also sent emails promoting a free gift to the recipient if they were to sign up for the service. However, the reporter had signed up the previous day and was now upset to see an offer for something that she was no longer eligible for.

In 2015, Endurance International Group acquired email firm Constant Contact for $1.1 billion. In 2014, IBM snapped up Silverpop, and Adobe acquired Neolane for $600 million. In 2013, Oracle bought Responsys for $1.5 billion, and Salesforce paid $2.5 billion for ExactTarget. Chad White, research director at Litmus, predicts that acquisitions will continue in the New Year.

Online retail sales increased 20 percent between Black Friday and Christmas Eve in 2015, as compared to the same period last year, according to a new report from MasterCard Advisors. Total retail sales excluding automobiles and gasoline rose 7.9 percent during the period, according to the research.