The reasons why these people give out my email instead of one that they can access have always been a bit mysterious to me. It’s one thing to save yourself some spam by using a throwaway address. But why use someone else’s for correspondence you actually want to receive? The closest I’ve come to a working theory is that a lot of them, having been slow off the mark to obtain their own gmail, have addresses like eratliff75@gmail.com. Either they believe they can leave off the numbers and receive the messages anyway, or they often simply forget. That or the E. Ratliffs of the world just view eratliff@gmail.com as some kind of shared resource.

Upon gaining access to an ESP, the criminals then steal subscriber data (PII such as names, addresses, telephone numbers and email addresses, and in one case, Vehicle Identification Numbers). They then use ESPs’ mailing facility to send spam; to monetize their illicit acquisition, the criminals have spammed ads for fake Adobe Acrobat and Skype software.

On March 30, the Epsilon Interactive division of Alliance Data Marketing (ADS on NASDAQ) suffered a massive breach that upped the ante, substantially.  Email lists of at least eight financial institutions were stolen. 

Thus far, puzzlingly, Epsilon has refused to release the names  of compromised clients. [...] The obvious issue at hand is the ability of the thieves to now undertake targeted spear-phishing problem as critically serious as it could possibly be.

As the 1 January deadline gallops towards the EU, microbusinesses desperate to stay open without breaking the law try to find out, "Can I email stuff out instead?" Well... Yes. - No - It depends - and simultaneously yes AND no, according to Schrödinger’s VAT. So that's clear, then.

email groups (the modern version of mailing lists) have stagnated over the past decade. Yahoo Groups and Google Groups both exude the dank air of benign neglect. Google Groups hasn’t been updated in years, and some of Yahoo’s recent changes have actually made Yahoo Groups worse! And yet, millions of people put up with this uncertainty and neglect, because email groups are still one of the best ways to communicate with groups of people. And I have a plan to make them even better.
So today I’m launching Groups.io in beta, to bring email groups into the 21st Century. At launch, we have many features that those other services don’t have, including:

Integration with other services, including: Github, Google Hangouts, Dropbox, Instagram, Facebook Pages, and the ability to import Feeds into your groups.
Businesses and organizations can have their own private groups on their own subdomain.
Better archive organization, using hashtags.
Many more email delivery options.
The ability to mute threads or hashtags.
Fully searchable archives, including searching within attachments.

One other feature that Groups.io has that Yahoo and Google don’t, is a business model that’s not based on showing ads to you. Public groups are completely free on Groups.io. Private groups and organizations are very reasonably priced.

Where you have obtained contact details in the context of the sale of a product or service, you may only use these details for direct marketing by electronic mail if the following conditions are met:

the product or service you are marketing is of a kind similar to that which you sold to the customer at the time you obtained their contact details
At the time you collected the details, you gave the customer the opportunity to object, in an easy manner and without charge, to their use for marketing purposes
Each time you send a marketing message, you give the customer the right to object to receipt of further messages
The sale of the product or service occurred not more than twelve months prior to the sending of the electronic marketing communication or, where applicable, the contact details were used for the sending of an electronic marketing communication in that twelve month period.

Today we are enhancing SES with the addition of delivery notifications. You can now elect to receive an Amazon SNS notification each time SES successfully delivers a message to a recipient's email server. These notifications give you increased visibility into the mail delivery process. With today's release, you can now track deliveries, bounces, and complaints, all via notification to the SNS topic or topics of your choice.

Former Mayor of Kildare, Cllr. Michael Nolan, has denied a claim he asked a local campaigner to stop e-mailing him. Cllr. Michael Nolan from Newbridge said his site was hacked and wrong e-mails were sent out to a number of people, including Leixlip based campaigner, John Weigel.

Mr. Weigel has been campaigning, along with others, about the danger of electromagnetic radiation to humans and the proximity of communications masts to homes and, in particular schools. He regularly updates local politicians on news items relating to the issue.

Recently, he said that he had received an e-mail from Cllr. Nolan asking to be removed from Mr. Weigel’s e-mail list.

The Leader asked Cllr. Nolan why he had done this. But the Fine Gael councillors said that “his e-mail account was hacked and on one particular day a number of mails a were sent from my account pertaining to be from me.”

To bring the world our unique end-to-end encrypted protocol and architecture that is the 'next-generation' of private and secure email. As founding partners of The Dark Mail Alliance, both Silent Circle and Lavabit will work to bring other members into the alliance, assist them in implementing the new protocol and jointly work to proliferate the worlds first end-to-end encrypted 'Email 3.0' throughout the world's email providers. Our goal is to open source the protocol and architecture and help others implement this new technology to address privacy concerns against surveillance and back door threats of any kind.

The spam presidency. As European citizens are made the miserable targets of unimpeded “direct marketing”, that may be how Ireland’s stint in the EU presidency seat is recalled for years to come.
Under the guiding hand of Minister for Justice Alan Shatter, the Council of the European Union has submitted proposals for amendments to a proposed new data protection regulation, all of which overwhelmingly favour business and big organisations, not citizens.
The most obviously repugnant and surprising element in the amendments is a watering down of existing protections for EU citizens against the willy-nilly marketing Americans are forced to endure. In the US there are few meaningful restrictions on what businesses can do with people’s personal information when pitching products and services at them.
In the EU, this has always been strictly controlled; information gathered for one purpose cannot be used by a business to sell whatever it wants – unless you have opted in to receive such solicitations. This means you are not constantly bombarded by emails and junk mail, nor do you get non-stop phone calls from telemarketers.
Under the proposed amendments to the draft data protection regulation, direct marketing would become a legal form of data processing. In effect, this would legitimise spam email, junk print mail and marketing calls. This unexpected provision signals just how successful powerful corporate lobbyists have been in convincing ministers that business matters more than privacy or giving citizens reasonable control over their personal information.
Far worse is contained in other amendments, which in effect turn the original draft of the regulation upside down.