The Hill reports that Attorney General Eric Holder told the House Judiciary Committee that the Justice Department would be in support of legislation that requires law enforcement to obtain a warrant before accessing email. His support gives a major boost to those who want to update the ECPA – a decades old bill that allows law enforcement to obtain emails without a warrant as long as said email is more than 180 days old.

Of course, Holder did have some reservations. He said that any update to the ECPA should include exemptions for “certain very limited circumstances.” For example, he said that law enforcement agencies shouldn’t have to obtain a warrant for civil investigations.

It was encouraging, however, to hear that Holder is in support of “the general notion of having a warrant to obtain the content of communications.” It’s only slightly less encouraging to think that his idea of exemptions may cut our large swaths of the bill, thus making it less effective.

If the Justice Department truly is in favor of updating the ECPA, it will be interesting to see which one it comes out in favor of. Many hope that it would support Rep. Zoe Lofgren’s bill – The Online Communications and Protection Act. It’s a far reaching bill that not only requires a warrant before accessing email and other online communications, but also requires a warrant when accessing any geolocation data from mobile device carriers.

Lofgren’s bill may be too far reaching for the Justice Department though. It may instead opt to back something like the ECPA Amendments Act of 2013, a bill from Sen. Patrick Leahy that only requires law enforcement to obtain a warrant when accessing email. It says nothing about geolocation data.

Regardless, the Justice Department’s support may not even be enough to pass anything this soon. Both the House and the Senate are wrangling with other issues at the moment, and it looks like ECPA reform has been put on the back burner yet again.

Starting today, Google will begin to roll out a few new quick actions inside Gmail, including event invite responses that link to Google Calendar, places reviews that let you rate a restaurant, for instance, right inside Gmail, and one-click actions like confirming a product or site registration via email.

“These buttons appear next to certain types of messages in your inbox and let you take action on an email without ever having to open it. For example, you can RSVP to your friend’s party invitation or rate that restaurant you went to last night all right from the inbox. You’ll be checking things off that to-do list in no time,” says Google.

Another quick action involves check-ins for flights. Although the quick action button in this scenario takes you outside of Gmail for confirmation, flight emails now feature a useful card with all the pertinent info – time of departure, terminal and gate, estimated arrival time, and whether of not the flight is on time.

Google is also asking developers to add custom actions to their emails, and they say that they hope to add many more action in the near future. Developers can go here for more info. These new actions should hit your Gmail inbox in the coming weeks.

If you’re curious about more new stuff from Google (and there’s a lot of it), check out all the news from Wednesday’s I/O conference keynote.

While some have raised spam-related concerns about the product, as far as we can tell, it basically operates like other third-party email marketing products. Customers won’t be getting surprise spam from TripAdvisor.com. They’ll be getting emails from hotels they’ve stayed at, which they’ve agreed to get emails about (even if it’s TripAdvisor doing the actual sending behind the scenes). The emails just come with encouragement for guests to leave reviews on TripAdvisor.

The video shows the basic process:

Review Express lets businesses add their own logos and personalized messages, and includes the ability to bulk upload up to 1,000 email addresses. It also processes send requests within 24 hours, and provides automatic notification of successful and unsuccessful sends. It can send messages in 21 languages.

“With Review Express, TripAdvisor aims to extend the relationship between businesses and their guests to encourage them to write reviews. This is a time-saver for owners, providing them with a powerful system to manage multiple emails and requests at no cost to the business,” said Severine Philardeau, vice president of global partnerships, TripAdvisor. “Review Express has been developed and enhanced based on extensive user testing and is an invaluable service for hospitality business owners looking to build their online reputation. When used in conjunction with our free display offerings for owners, Review Express provides a great online marketing package for small and independent hospitality business owners to capture the value of user reviews for their property.”

Businesses will want to follow the best practices TripAdvisor has laid out.

Microsoft this week announced that Hotmail is officially gone. The service has been rolled into Microsoft’s new Outlook.com service.

Outlook.com Group Program Manager Dick Craddock announced the death of Hotmail on Thursday, over on the Outlook Blog. From the blog post:

We want to give a huge “Thank you” to all of you who have supported Hotmail over the years, for some of you, that’s going back as far as 1996. It has been an amazing journey and we’ve been honored to provide you with a great mail experience for many years. When we launched the original preview of Outlook.com, we knew that we were committing to building the world’s best email with a brand and product experience that spans from consumers all the way to the largest organizations. We’re excited to have you join Outlook.com as we write the next chapter in modern email from Microsoft.

With the added users from Hotmail, Outlook.com can now boast more than 400 million active accounts. Craddock stated that the Outlook team was able to migrate 150 petabytes of email in just 6 weeks while maintaining Hotmail users’ preferences and contacts.

Hotmail users will still be able to use their @hotmail.com email address, but will access their inbox from the Outlook website. Microsoft is now using a single ‘Microsoft Account’ for all of its services, including SkyDrive, which is tightly integrated into Outlook.

Microsoft announced that it’s rolling out a preview of Skype for Outlook.com to those in the UK today. It already integrated Skype into the latest enterprise Outlook software, but now the same functionality will soon be available to regular users on the Web version of Outlook.

The preview version of Skype for Outlook.com will be available soon as a plugin for Internet Explorer, Chrome and Firefox. The plugin will ask you to connect your Microsoft account with your Skype account, and then you can start video calling people in Outlook. Just look for the usual Skype icons when mousing over a friend’s contact details.

Skype for Outlook.com is just the latest in Microsoft’s mission of integrating Skype into pretty much all of its services. It already merged the old Windows Live Messenger client into Skype, and a rumor emerged earlier this year saying that Xbox chat would be replaced by Skype in the next Xbox.

Skype for Outlook.com is available in the UK starting today, but what about everyone else? Microsoft says that its latest Skype integration will be available to users in the US and Germany in the coming weeks. Everybody else will have to wait until Summer.

Last week, Sen. Patrick Leahy said that the Senate Judiciary Committee would be marking up an update to the Electronic Communications Privacy Act. The decades old bill allows law enforcement to obtain emails without a warrant as long as said email is 180 days old.

The Hill reports that both the Senate and the House will be taking up their respective email privacy bills today. The Senate Judiciary Committee will be taking a look at Leahy’s bill – S. 607 – that simply requires the police to obtain a warrant when accessing any electronic communication, including email.

In the original announcement of the mark up, Leahy said that ECPA must be updated to counter concerns over the “growing and unwelcome intrusions into our private lives in cyberspace.” Those concerns certainly came to a head earlier this month when documents obtained by the ACLU revealed that the IRS told its agents that they could obtain emails without a warrant. The agency also said that “Internet users do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy.”

Since then, IRS Commissioner Steven Miller said that his agency always obtains a warrant before searching emails. Miller also said that his agency never snoops through email during civil investigations. It wasn’t exactly reassuring, but an updated ECPA would ensure that the IRS, or any government agency for that matter, would never be able to obtain emails without a warrant.

It should be noted that the House will be making a mockery of itself this week by discussing an update to the ECPA after passing CISPA. The House Judiciary Committee will be discussing whether or not the ECPA should be updated to require that law enforcement obtain a warrant before accessing geolocation data. The irony here is that CISPA, in its current form, would allow mobile carriers to share geolocation data with the government without a warrant. Even if the carrier was found in violation of an updated ECPA, it would enjoy full legal immunity under CISPA.

Even so, we’ll continue to follow both discussions and keep you up to date on any changes. The Senate seems to have made an updated ECPA a priority so we may see a final vote as early as next week. That is, of course, if the Senate doesn’t run into any problems with its current controversial bill – the Marketplace Fairness Act.

The format consists of flexible-sized tile strips, which Microsoft says gives advertisers a “valuable surface area” to deliver relevant content in scenarios where people expect commercial content. Here’s a look:

There are three customizable templates that advertisers can use: Online Retailer, Media Showcase and Catalogue.

Online Retailer, Microsoft says, “Allows the advertiser to capture consumers’ attention, and showcase a product or a service, and then connect the consumer to the advertiser’s online distributors. From a consumer standpoint, this template enables them to locate brick and mortar retail outlets in their area, alongside viewing and discovering product or service details within the tile experience.”

The company adds that Media Showcase “Gives a unique ad experience to get a brand’s message conveyed by using a combination of video, image galleries and text. The template is applicable to multiple verticals aiming at building awareness and consumer engagement.”

Catalogues simply lets you feature multiple products. The first tile shows the theme, and the others show different products.

In addition to three templates, the versaTiles format also consists of three states: Default, Hover and Click. The default state is what consumers see when they log in to Outlook.com, the hover state shows more in-depth info and/or additional images and info when they hover over the ad, and the click state has the ad expand when clicked, showing different creative elements or brand messaging (which varies by template).

“With amazing displays, vibrant colors and lifelike images, tablets have changed the way we experience books, photos, movies and more. Yet email, something we do every day, has remained pretty much the same,” says Lee Parry, Senior Director, Mobile & Emerging Products at Yahoo, in a post on the Yahoo Mail Blog. “We’ve been boxed in.”

“There are no folders, no buttons, no tabs – just you and your mail – and you can easily flip through it like a magazine,” he says of the new offering. “We’ve designed Yahoo! Mail to take full advantage of the tablet making reading your email faster, easier and just a little bit more fun.”

The app lets you delete or file messages in bulk, group them by sender, and delete/star/move them by swiping.

The Hill reports that IRS Commissioner Steven Miller was present at a congressional hearing today where Sen. Chuck Grassley grilled the commissioner on the agency’s email policy. Miller said that his agency obtains a search warrant before requesting emails, and even went further by saying that the agency never requests emails during civil investigations.

Miller also said that his agency follows the ruling set in United States v. Warshak, a Sixth Circuit Court decision that said the government must obtain a warrant before requesting emails from a service provider. The decision is only binding in the Sixth Circuit, but the IRS says it applies the ruling to operations nationwide.

What’s interesting here is that the documents obtained by the ACLU suggests the IRS does the exact opposite. The documents never explicitly state that the IRS snooped through emails without a warrant, but everything points to this conclusion. Even when taking United States v. Warshak into account, the IRS reportedly said that it only needed to worry about a warrant in the Sixth Circuit.

Of course, senators brought up this disparity during the hearing. Miller said that his agency will work on clarifying its procedures, but still insisted that it obtained a warrant when snooping through emails. Unfortunately, Miller said that he couldn’t say the same thing for other online communications like Facebook messages, but that’s only because he didn’t know the agency’s specific warrant requirements for these new types of communications.

Today’s hearing precedes the Senate Judiciary Committee’s planned markup of the decades old ECPA law on Thursday. Currently, the ECPA lets law enforcement obtain emails with only a subpoena if the email in question is over 180 days old. The bill going before Committee on Thursday will require law enforcement to obtain a warrant when obtaining emails and other online communications regardless of its age.

The Hill reports that the Senate Judiciary Committee plans to mark-up Sen. Patrick Leahy’s ECPA amendment on Thursday morning. S.607 would require law enforcement to obtain a warrant when requesting emails as part of an investigation. The current law under ECPA requires a warrant only if the email is less than 180 days old. An older email, or one that’s already been opened, only requires a subpoena under current law.

Sen. Leahy issued the following statement today in regards to the mark-up:

“Like many Americans, I am concerned about the growing and unwelcome intrusions into our private lives in cyberspace. I have long believed that our government should obtain a search warrant — issued by a court — before gaining access to our email and other private communications. This week the Senate Judiciary Committee will begin consideration of legislation that I authored with Republican Senator Mike Lee to reform the Electronic Communications Privacy Act to make sure that this occurs, and that the overall privacy protections for our email and other electronic communications are strengthened. Safeguarding Americans’ privacy rights is not a Democratic issue or a Republican issue — it is something that is important to all Americans, regardless of political party or ideology. I hope that all members of Congress share this view and will support this timely and significant legislation that upholds Americans’ privacy rights.”

Sen. Leahy’s proposed ECPA amendment was introduced in late March, but one event in particular may have forced his hand to push ECPA reform faster than he may have planned. The ACLU obtained a number of documents from the IRS that suggested the agency obtained emails without a warrant, and said that Internet users “do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy.”

In response, Rep. Charles Boustany sent a letter to the IRS asking the agency to explain its email policy. It’s highly unlikely that the agency would answer all of the questions posed by Rep. Boustany, but it did say that it “treats taxpayers with respect” and “does not use emails to target taxpayers.”

Sen. Leahy’s bill is a great first step to updating the decades old ECPA, but a House vote this week could be a different first step in making an updated ECPA a moot point. CISPA, a bill that would let companies share you private information with the government, will go to the House floor for a vote this week. If it somehow makes its way into law, it would allow companies to share your emails and much more with the government while enjoying total immunity in the case the government uses that information for anything illegal. Fortunately, the White House has serious reservations, but it didn’t go so far as to issue a veto threat.

We’ll keep following both ECPA and CISPA as they make their way through the legislature over the coming months. We can only hope that the former makes its way all way through, and the latter is treated to the same ignoble death its predecessor was dealt last year.