Apparel merchants, particularly flash sale sites, are doing an excellent job at using email to increase site traffic, according to a new report from Internet Retailer. The Best Email Marketers in E-Commerce report found that these merchants rely on email to drive repeat business. Flash sale site Beyond the Rack, for instance generates more than 16 percent of its site traffic from email and email generates more than 60 percent of its revenue.

Several Democratic senators have raised questions as to whether the investigations into former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's email server are impartial. The group penned a letter to the Inspector General of National Intelligence Charles McCullough III and Inspector General of the Department of State Steve Linick, raising these concerns and asking the the inspectors to "perform your duties dispassionately and comprehensively".

Snapchat and Seagate Technologies were among companies that fell for email scams and inadvertently released employee tax documents this year. The scam made it look like the emails came from the companies' top officials. The employees that received the spam messages responded by sharing W-2 tax forms with scammers. These transactions exposed the income, personal addresses and social security numbers of company employees.

Attorney General Loretta Lynch told testified to a Senate panel this week that the White House has not been briefed on the Hillary Clinton email investigation. She revealed that the Justice Department would not discuss the issue with anyone including President Obama. When questioned on an event that would lead to Obama being debriefed, Lynch declined to comment.

N.C. Republican Party Chairman Hasan Harnett's party email account was turned off this week. Harnett blamed Executive Director Dallas Woodhouse showing their battle for control two days before the state's primary. Harnett accused Woodhouse of trying to undermine the party's elected leadership. Woodhouse contends that Harnett's email was shut off along with several other officials for security reasons.

The United Kingdom's Criminal Justice Secure Email (CJSM) system is being overhauled after experiencing several outages over the past few months. The new upgrade is designed to help English and Welsh criminal justice systems collaborate and send more secure email. To do so, the users must stop using the service's webmail and revert to conventional email clients.

Julie Desk, a virtual assistant through automated email typically associated with scheduling meetings and appointments, has raised $658,470 (EUR600,000) in funding. The investment comes from SIDE Capital. Julie uses AI to help users turn their inboxes into scheduling tools. Users must simply CC "Julie" during an email thread to add the meeting discussed to a schedule.

Sophos has released a new layer of email security called Sophos Sandstorm. The tool, called Sophos Sandstorm, is aimed at small and mid-sized businesses. It can be added to the company's Sophos Email Appliance (SEA) as an advanced malware defense.

AWeber is selected as best email marketing service by PC Magazine readers. he email marketing service received a score of 8.5 in overall satisfaction, an 8.9 in reliability, and a 9.0 in likelihood to recommend. Readers nominated more than 25 companies for the annual competition, eight of which made it to the finalist phase. New finalists this year included: Active Campaign, AWeber, and Vertical Response.

Despite stricter legislation on email sent in Canada, email ad spend is up. In 2015, companies spent CA$21.8 million on email services, up 14.8 percent from 2014. In 2016, that number is expected to grow another 10.0 percent and will continue to rise until 2020. The data includes money spent on email marketers including banners that are served within sponsored email campaigns.