A message that looks fine on a laptop might not on a phone. So test it out before you send anything to a busy or important person. "You always have to take into account that someone will be processing that message on-the-go, in an impatient state, at a glance," said Jocelyn Glei, author of Unsubscribe: How to Kill Email Anxiety, Avoid Distractions, and Get Real Work Done.

Taoiseach Enda Kenny has told the Dail he uses a personal email account for official business. But he said that email address does not receive sensitive Government information. Kenny said he had a number of email accounts. But he said it would not be appropriate to transmit this correspondence on an official department email account.

Yahoo has said more than one billion user accounts may have been affected in a hacking attack dating back to 2013. The Internet giant said it appeared separate from a 2014 breach disclosed in September, when Yahoo revealed that 500 million accounts had been accessed. Yahoo said names, phone numbers, passwords and email addresses were stolen, but not bank and payment data.

The ePrivacy Directive is the piece of EU legislation that informs the UK's own Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations (PECR). A Directive means that EU member states are allowed some autonomy to alter the law, so the rules around electronic communications vary across the EU. The new law will be upgraded to a Regulation meaning greater consistency between member states.

Want to boost the open rates of your holiday-themed emails? Then you should be more specific in your subject lines about which holidays you're referencing, according to recent research from Sailthru. The report was based on an analysis of data from 89,932 email campaigns sent by Sailthru customers in the retail/e-commerce vertical during the 2015 holiday season.

"How does your perspective of reaching people change when you force yourself to believe that your customer will only see your email on their phone, and that anything you ask them to do based on that email (shop, watch a video, complete a survey) will be done on their mobile device? I believe that marketers who adopt this attitude about email marketing can win big in 2017."

According to eDataSource, Amazon's email marketing efforts have outperformed seven other retailers so far this month. Tracking campaigns sent between November 29 (the day after Cyber Monday) through December 10, the e-commerce giant sent 1,691 email campaigns -- earning 96.6% inbox placement and a 19.8% read rate.

Retailers sent 55.4% more email campaigns on Black Friday this year than in 2015, and they sent 42% more on Cyber Monday compared to a year earlier, according to data released by digital marketing vendor eDataSource.

Yahoo, which was in the limelight for revealing a massive hack on its users earlier this year, has fixed a critical cross-site scripting (XSS) security flaw in its email system that would have allowed attackers to access any email. The flaw was discovered and reported by Finland-based security researcher Jouko Pynnonen, who earned $10,000 for the feat from Yahoo's bug bounty programme.

"Google's Gmail works fine, but, like Facebook, it's long been "that thing I use because it's a thing I use, not because it's delightful." Apple Mail, meanwhile, has simple technical issues, few features, and too bland of a design. Bored with these defaults, I ventured into the land of third-party alternatives to try Spark, an Apple-focused email client from Ukrainian developer Readdle."