Insurance company USAA has dropped ad agency Campbell Ewald over an email. One of the agency's creative directors sent out a racist email that was published on Adweek's AgencySpy website last week. The email, sent to colleagues, promoted a "Ghetto Day in San Antonio" and that would involve ghetto music, Malt 45s at lunch, ghetto terminology, and drugs and prostitution.

Four students at the University of California, Berkeley, are suing Google alleging that the company violated privacy rules in its Apps for Education program, which provides Gmail and other Google products to universities. The individuals claim that Google illegally read their university emails without consent and then used information found in those emails to create tailored advertising profiles.

Scam emails doubled in The Netherlands in January. The online fraud hotline Fraudehelpdesk.nl received complaints about 32,848 scam emails up from 16,705 reports in December. These spam emails range from bank scams to outstanding traffic fine scams.

WhatsApp now counts as many users as Gmail. The messaging app revealed that it now has one billion users, suggesting that mobile chat is now as popular as email.

Seventy percent of mobile users checked their email on their mobile devices. Despite this massive audience, only 42 percent of marketers use responsive email templates on a regular basis to automatically adapt content to a user's screen size. And yet, responsive email generates a 21 percent higher click/open ratio than non-responsive email templates.

The residential property industry in Australia is hoping to update residential tenancy laws to recognize email as an official form of communication. The industry says that the adoption of email for document delivery will make its processes more efficient. The documents exchanged between landlords and tenants include leases and eviction papers, and are currently required to be sent in the mail or delivered in person.

Email marketing services firm AWeber is launching a new podcast dedicated to email marketing. The "Ask Me About Email Marketing" will allow listeners to send in a question to be discussed on the weekly show. Episodes of the show will air every Tuesday for 15 minutes. AWeber executives will field the questions. The company has already produced eight of these shows.

Public companies in Australia and New Zealand are adopting cloud email services at a faster rate than other companies, according to research from Gartner. The report found that Microsoft Office 365 is the email cloud provider of choice in this region, with a lot less of these companies using Google Apps for Work. However, in the wider Asia region, Google outranks Microsoft for usage.

Airmail a popular email client for Macs is now available on iOS devices.The $4.99 app works with various email services including Gmail, iCloud, Outlook, and Exchange. It allows users to manage messages, hit snooze and even sync messages and documents with iCloud.

Australian professionals are not required to secure their email. Despite the rise in data breaches and email hacks, no one seems to be doing anything about it. While some companies use encrypted email tools, these early adopters are few and far between and most industries have not adopted email encryption as a standard industry practice.