The fashion designers behind the luxury line Marques'Almeida have a whole new take on personalized email marketing. For their 2015 campaign, the designers are sending individually personalized emails to their friends and clients based on the recipient's interests. The customers filled out a questionnaire about how their style demands and the designers are having their photographer and stylist friends create images with specific looks for these individual customers.

Email marketing services firm Campaign Monitor has released a new transactional email capability for marketers. The tool makes it easier for marketers to create transactional emails within the vendor's drag-and-drop platform without having to rely on their IT department to access these features.

The FBI is investigating Hillary Clinton's email security procedures while she used a private email server while serving as secretary of state. The investigation is looking at the email system's security to determine if the classified information that she sent an received via email was done so using secure email protocols.

The University of Iowa is working to upgrade the university's email system for faculty and staffers thanks to a new partnership with Microsoft. The university is migrating its system to Microsoft Office 365 and the upgrade will be complete by the end of 2015. The new system brings users from 1 GB of storage to 50 GB. In addition, users will soon have 1 TB of storage through OneDrive.

Christopher Glenn, a former IT professionals who was hired to work for the Pentagon, has been sentenced to 10 years in prison after being convicted of hacking of a military email account and stealing sensitive files. U.S. District Judge Kenneth Marra said that Glenn's actions led to "serious damage to national security." Glenn worked at the Soto Cano Air Base in Honduras where he gained access to this confidential information and made copies of thousands of messages.

Researchers from VeriSign and the U.S. government are looking at ways to make email more secure through domain names. The idea is to create a new set of security protocols built around the domain name system. Emails would have signed and unsigned versions. Both would employ Transport Layer Security (TLS) to secure messages sent between email servers, as well as DANE security protocol to protect the TLS keys. The signed versions would get another layer of security through S/MIME on the end user's client device.

Cyber Monday was one of the most popular events for email marketing last year. According to new research from Yesmail, 67 percent of brands sent emails in advance of or on the shopping holiday during Q3, Q4 2014. This holiday was followed only by Back to School in which 60 percent of brands sent emails and Christmas, in which 60 percent of brands sent emails.

The Criminal Justice Secure Email platform in the UK, a system run by Vodafone, may not be as secure as it should be. According to insiders, the CJSM, which is in place to ensure secure communications between the Government Secure Intranet and those in the criminal justice world including lawyers and police contractors, has experienced security problems. According to a report in The Register UK, the system only uses one layer of security.

MT Online, a digital startup based in Mexico, does not use email or have meetings, yet the company has been going strong for the last eight years. The firm decided to do away with email because the founders felt that it operates as a kind of communication behind closed doors and keeps everyone in the company from watching the progression of a project. Instead the startup relies on their own in-house collaboration based technologies in which everyone can see documents and the progression of any given project.

Researchers at The Harvard Business Review recommend that business people think carefully about which channel they use to communication. While email, IM and the phone are all very useful tools to communicate, they each have their strength. According to the researchers, email is "great for recaps, updates, and other informational exchanges." But when it comes time to discuss more detail-oriented or sensitive items, it's time to pick up the phone.