When whistleblower Edward Snowden said that he could wiretap anyone from his computer if he had their personal email address, he wasn't lying. The latest revelation in Snowden's series of leaks is the name of a program used by the NSA called XKeyscore, which lets government agencies follow an Internet user around the web simply by having their email address or IP address. Government officials are not required to get a warrant, they simply have to share the email address, along with a written justification for the request and a time frame. The new documents also revealed that "bodies" of emails are searchable, …

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence has released three previously classified documents about the surveillance procedures of the National Security Agency, just as intelligence officials have begun testifying at a Senate hearing on these processes. The documents reveal that for years the NSA has been tapping into the emails of Americans and have had access to information about the sender, the recipient and the time of day the emails were sent. While this release is a step in a more transparent direction for the US government, The Guardian has revealed more about NSA procedures through the publication of …

Almost a quarter of permission based email marketing messages don't make it to the inbox says a new study from email deliverability services company Return Path. According to the Inbox Placement Rate Benchmarks Report, 22 percent of marketing emails sent to subscribers who had opted in did not reach the inbox during the first half of 2013. ReturnPath looked at a sample of almost 1 trillion messages sent worldwide, and found that 18 percent of all email messages were either blocked or went missing, while the remaining four percent hit the spam folder.

Most people are think that they can tell the difference between a phishing email and a real one, but when it comes down to it, they really can't. According to new research from North Carolina State University, 89% of the people surveyed said that they could spot a phishing email, but only 7.5% of the participants succeeded in doing so when they were asked to distinguish between a legitimate email and a phishing one.

Syrian hackers have hacked into the personal Gmail accounts of three White House staffers, according to Matthew Keys, the former social media editor of Reuters who was fired for allegedly helping Anonymous hack the Los Angeles Times' Twitter account. A fourth attempt, which failed, alerted the White House to the compromise. A member of the Syrian Electronic Army, the group that is taking credit for the hack, told Keys that the hack succeeded and failed.

Whistleblower Edward Snowden has released new top secret documents revealing a National Security Agency program that lets analysts search through databases of emails, online chats and Internet browsing history without requiring authorization. The NSA program, which is called XKeyscore, claims to be the "widest-reaching" system for developing intelligence online. The latest document release comes as senior intelligence officials are expected to testify at the Senate judiciary committee today.

The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is hoping to get better access to private email data. The agency is expected to release a proposal this week requesting warrantless powers. The proposal would give the SEC access to electronic communications of people and companies that are under investigation without requiring a warrant. The SEC is pushing for these powers to be part of an amendment to the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986 (ECPA), which is currently being updated. If update, the ECPA will likely require government agencies to get a warrant in order to access private communications, and the …

There are plenty of people who want to talk about the death of email. Dela Quist, CEO of Alchemy Worx is not one of them. In an interview with Direct Marketing News, Quist pointed out that there are 4 billion email addresses globally and people send almost 200 billion emails per day, not including spam. To put this in perspective, according to Worx, there are only 3 billion searches a day. Worx also argues that email is a foundation of social media, i.e. you need an email address to join a social network and social networks are some of the …

In a move to make its email marketing efforts more effective among inactive subscribers, Limoges Jewelry and its email provider Responsys created an email series target at email subscribers who hadn't opened an email in six months. The idea was to win back these customers, cut the frequency of emails they received or simply remove them from the list. The series of emails included motivating offers, and those people that didn't open the emails got a chance to control their frequency, before being removed from the list. The campaign did the best during the 2012 holiday season and the 2013 …

Filtering email messages into its own folder could actually help marketers, according to Forrester analyst Sucharita Mulpuru. "The segregation could actually be helpful because people can quickly scan in one place things that may/may not be relevant without having to hunt for personal emails in a sea of mixed clutter," she told Time. Last month Google introduced Gmail tabs, putting marketing messages into a promotional column and ever since then marketers have been keeping a close eye on whether or not this new filtering system will hurt their email efforts. According to report published by Forrester in June, consumers are …