While email is certainly not dead, it is definitely getting harder to do it well, especially as consumers are demanding improved and customised email experiences. The demand now is for emails that are easy to read, personalised and relevant. Spamming irrelevant content will only result in it being ignored, or worse, unsubscribed from.

Facebook has tweaked and rebranded its business offering, going head to head with enterprise software tools such as Microsoft's Yammer and Slack. Workplace by Facebook was previously known as Facebook at Work, and is now open to any company. It is priced based on who is using the product, rather than using the group licensing model common to business software.

The Information Commissioner's Office has published a new code of practice for privacy notices. The code directly addresses the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and includes a useful chart showing what information the GDPR mandates that an organisation inform an individual of when their personal data is collected.

The service is headquartered in London, making it the first major Facebook product to be designed and launched by a team outside the U.S. Workplace for Facebook will take on the likes of Slack and Yammer, intended to replace email with an easy-to-use, smartphone-friendly interface.

Yahoo has denied that it has made it deliberately difficult for customers to migrate to another email provider. It follows the disabling of an email-forwarding feature that allows people to migrate automatically. Yahoo said it was a "temporary" move while it worked on improvements. The firm is dealing with fallout from a massive breach of customer data.

One in five Scots has had their e-mail compromised or hacked, it has been claimed. Research by Stay Private, an internet security firm, found that despite security breaches, Internet users continue to use e-mail to send sensitive information. The survey of more than 2,000 people comes amid increasing warnings from police about the growth in cyber crime.

Of all the different forms of online advertising and promotions, email marketing has to be one of the most effective. Not only that, it's also one of the oldest forms of engagement on the internet today. Just think about how everything has quickly changed on the Internet over the past two decades. The one constant over the years has been email.

Yahoo's alleged scanning hundreds of millions of users' emails at the request of U.S. intelligence raises serious human rights concerns. "Government monitoring of digital communications, when conducted as described in recent reports, could undermine the privacy that individuals depend on in order to seek, receive and impart information online," said David Kaye, UN special rapporteur.

A tweak to Microsoft's Outlook.com cloud service has blocked a good number of people from accessing their messages. Specifically, the baffling and unannounced change affects Outlook.com users with connected accounts: these are email accounts hosted on third-party servers (such as a company's private server or an ISP's mail server) that are accessed via the Outlook.com cloud.

Deutsche Post AG, parent of DHL, has sold 100% of its stake in email marketing technology firm optivo GmbH to to cloud-based digital content, commerce and marketing management platform firm Episerver AB, the company said in a statement. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.