Up to 400 million logins on the "sex and swingers" hook-up site Adult Friend Finder have been leaked, according to an unverified report. The site's operator has begun an investigation. It said it had already fixed a vulnerability but would not confirm there had been a breach. The leak is said to cover 20 years of sign-ins, including deleted accounts.

How carefully do you really read your emails? Recent months have seen a major rise in cyberscams using emails that trick victims into handing over card details, passwords and more. The emails use real-looking company logos and fonts, but are also loaded with malicious links, which when clicked, can steal valuable personal information.

People who buy products marketed to them via email spend a whopping 138% more than people outside the email marketing campaign. With figures like that, email is a channel your business can't afford to ignore. So why is email marketing so valuable? It's because your subscribers want to hear from you. They have signed on the dotted line, metaphorically speaking.

Email marketers could be firing a lot of blanks as new research suggests that almost half of UK consumers have "ghost" email accounts that are active but no longer used because of the volume of marketing material they receive. The DMA, a trade association for the one-to-one marketing industry, carried out a consumer survey for its Consumer Email Tracker 2016 report.

Lodging, travel agency, and services companies scored 12th among 18 industries in their email marketing open rates, according to a new IBM Marketing Cloud study. That renders these travel companies among the most ineffective when considering higher-performing industries, including automobiles, banks, computer hardware, telecoms, software and consumer products, for example.

Unfortunately, this year customers feel they have been subjected to too many emails, too many irrelevant emails, and too many emails from companies they don't recognise. Their faith in the channel has been shaken. This is bad news for brands, for marketers using email and for the medium itself. We know that consumers like brand messages to be about them, for them and relevant to them.

No one likes a boring subject line, and 35% of consumers open emails based on subject lines alone, according to Convince and Convert. For marketers, this means that the more compelling your subject line amongst all the inbox noise, the more likely a customer is to open. So when giving your campaign a final look, ask yourself whether the subject line is compelling enough to open your email.

We sometimes think of email as the poor cousin of the digital age. It used to be cool. It used to be cutting-edge. But with social media, and instant messaging, and SMS, it just seems so -- dare I say it? -- old-fashioned and irrelevant. The communication channel of our grandparents. Except, of course, it's not. In fact, email might just be your greatest weapon.

Email marketing puts you in the driver's seat and allows you to control exactly what you send to whom. In fact, no other form of communication provides you with the same ability to deliver targeted messages and content. This means you can share tailored material that reflects the interests and behaviours of your varied segments or personas, wherever they are in the customer journey.

The European Commission has asked the United States about a secret court order Yahoo used to scan thousands of customer emails for possible terrorism links, following concerns that it may have violated a new data transfer pact. Under the Privacy Shield agreement that came into force in August, the U.S. agreed to limit the collection of and access to Europeans' data.