American workers are less productive, thanks to email, according to Deutsche Bank's Stuart Kirk. "Coincidentally, US economic output would also be one-third higher today but for a mysterious productivity slowdown starting [in] 1971. Economists might note that was when [the inventor of modern emailRaymond] Tomlinson first hit send," he argued in a note he sent to clients.

Yahoo has fixed up a vulnerability that could have potentially allowed hackers to spoof Yahoo email addresses. Independent researcher Lawrence Amer discovered the bug and published his finding on the Vulnerability Lab on Full Disclosure. Cyberattackers would have been able to spoof sender names of Yahoo email users remotely through the opening within the "compose message" module of the Yahoo service.

Sixty percent of retail marketers use purchase behavior data to improve email marketing messages and 50 percent use demographics data such as age, gender, and location, according to Yesmail .The research revealed that 69 percent of retailers use email activity such as opens and clicks and 41 percent use site browsing behavior to create targeted emails.

Staminus Communications, a distributed denial of service (DDoS) protection company, was taken down by hackers late last week. The company described the attack on Twitter as, "a rare event [that] cascaded across multiple routers in a system wide event, making our backbone unavailable." Data including: customer names, e-mail addresses, database table structures, and routing tables was stolen and posted online in a hacker "e-zine" format, under the title, "TIPS WHEN RUNNING A SECURITY COMPANY."

Hiver is a new platform that allows companies to turn Gmail into a business email platform that has customer support, sales and shared inboxes. Built on top of Gmail, Hiver allows users to assign emails to a particular person and to flag emails with tasks and status updates. The tool also includes email reminders, scheduling, notes, and shared templates.

Microsoft has released a new tool that makes it easy for users to import all of their Evernote data to Microsoft's OneNote service. OneNote features include: free offline access, unlimited monthly uploads and a free-form canvas. The release comes as EverNote has been facing some internal issues and their team is not as strong as they once were.

New Mexico politicians don't communicate using work email very often. The Associate Press made a request to obtain these records and discovered that most of these work email accounts contained messages sent from constituent, but had little outgoing mail. According to the report, these politicians use private email to make appointments with industry and special interest groups.

Email marketing services firm Adestra has joined the Email Sender & Provider Coalition (ESPC). As part of the partnership, Ryan Phelan, VP of Insight at Adestra, has been named to board of directors of ESPC. ESPC focuses on technological development, legislative advocacy and industry deliverability standards.

Estonian startup Fleep wants to see email and chat come together into one platform. The Tallinn-based firm led by Skype engineering veterans is aimed at enterprises who want to combine their existing email accounts and add a chat function to "enjoy a more efficient experience of written communications."

Yahoo is now allowing people to sign into its services with any email address. In the past, a person would have to create a Yahoo email address in order to create any kind of Yahoo account. For instance, a user can sign up for Yahoo Fantasy Sports with a Gmail address.