A few days ago, a Texas-based company called InNova Patent Licensing filed an infringement lawsuit against 36 well-known companies. The company claims to hold the patent on spam filtering, and appears to be resting on the notion that any company using spam filtering owes them.

Among the companies being sued are Google, Apple, AOL, Dell, HP, RIM, Yahoo, McAfee, Symantec, and Siemens. The list doesn’t stop at tech companies though. It also contains names like Frito Lay, Cinemark, J.C. Penney, Rent-A-Center, and Dr. Pepper.

A new report from Econsultancy suggests that email still beats social networks when it comes to marketing for e-commerce. The report says that over a third (37%) of consumers don’t use a social networking site, and that those who have become a "fan" or "friend" of a company or brand online are still in the minority.

A new report from Symantec’s MessageLabs finds that short URLs in spam have reached a "historical peak". This type of spam has increased significantly over the past year.

Spam containing shortened links hit a one day peak of 18%, or 23.4 billion spam emails, on April 30, 2010, doubling last year’s peak levels when spam with shortened links accounted for 9.3% of spam (more than 10 billion spam emails) on July 28, 2009.

Symantec has released its annual MessageLabs Intelligence Special Report, ranking the most spammed U.S. states and territories.

According to the report, Idaho receives the most spam (for the second year in a row), at a rate of 95.2%. The top spammed states are Idaho, Alabama, and South Carolina, with spam rates above 93%. The national average is only 89.3%. Indiana, Tennessee, Illinois, Utah, Washington, New Hampshire and North Carolina are next in line.

Facebook may be in big trouble. Mashable is pointing to a study from Roiworld that surveyed 600 teenagers, and found that while 80% of them are spending two hours per day online (on average), they are also showing signs of Facebook fatigue. According to this survey, one in five who have a Facebook account are either using it less or no longer visit it at all.

Yahoo has upgraded its HTML5 mobile web mail experience for the iPhone and iPod Touch, with a faster and more feature-rich version. It’s available as an opt-in trial, and has many of the same features as the desktop version.

Yahoo lists these properties of the offering:

Yahoo has launched Yahoo Mail and Yahoo Messenger apps for Android. These are the first Android apps Yahoo has ever offered.

Facebook thinks email is dying. Classic. How many times have we heard this now? Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg gave a speech at the Nielsen Consumer 360 conference recently, essentially claiming as much.

Do you think email is dying? Comment here.

Apple has announced that the new MobileMe Mail at me.com is now out of beta and available to all members.

MobileMe Mail has both widescreen and compact views and rules to keep your email organized. Apple explains, "Mail rules help you reduce inbox clutter by automatically filing messages into folders you select ahead of time. Set them up at me.com, and your rules organize your incoming email on the web and everywhere else — on your iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, Mac, and PC."

More than half (58%) of U.S. online consumers begin their day interacting with companies via email, compared to 20 percent who start their day on search engines and 11 percent on Facebook, according to a new study by Exact Target.

Security firm Symantec tells WebProNews that nine out of ten spam emails now contain a URL link in the message, and this month, around 5% of all domains found in spam URLs belonged to genuine websites. The top four of those belong to well-known social networking, blogging, file sharing and user-generated content sites.

Yahoo and Nokia officially announced a partnership, which has been expected for several days.

The two companies, which have collaborated for five years,  will provide consumers with e-mail, instant messaging and maps and navigation services. Specifically under the partnership:

The majority (80%) of Canadians, or 21.7 million people, used the Internet for personal reasons in 2009, up from 73 percent in 2007, according to a new survey by Statistics Canada.

Rates of Internet use increased in every province during this two-year period. The largest relative increase in Internet users occurred in New Brunswick and Newfoundland and Labrador (+15% each over 2007). Rates were highest at 85% in both British Columbia and Alberta, followed by 81% in Ontario.

Over the last month or so, most of the discussion around social media has been mostly related to Twitter and Facebook, as both recently had their developer conferences and introduced some new things to get people talking. We haven’t heard a whole lot of discussion around Google Buzz. When we have, it’s still mostly been about privacy.

Opera announced today it has acquired web-based email provider FastMail.fm. Opera’s offered its own email client since 2000, and now it will use FastMail to expand its own messaging product across various devices from mobile to TVs and gaming consoles.

Yahoo has announced that the Yahoo Mail API now allows Read and Read+Write access to full message contents for any type of user. What this means is that developers can create more useful ways to use Yahoo Mail.

Yahoo has begun rolling out what the company calls its "next milestone" in Facebook integration. Yahoo Mail users can now update their Facebook status right from their inbox, and they can see their friends’ Facebook profile photos in emails received in Yahoo Mail.

Symantec has a released a new report looking at the nature of industrial espionage and targeted attacks, a big issue right now, considering the whole Google/China situation. A representative for the firm tells WebPronews, "Further analysis of targeted attacks shows that the top five targeted roles are senior officials (VPs, Directors) and the individuals that receive the most targeted malware are responsible for foreign trade and defense policy, especially in relation to Asian countries."

Google introduced a new security feature for Gmail today. It notifies the user when a suspicious log-in activity is detected on their account. This notification will come in the form of a message saying ""Warning: We believe your account was last accessed from…" along with the geographic region that Google can best associate with the access. Engineering Director Pavni Diwanji explains on the Gmail Blog:

Every now and then, there is a discussion about where email stands as social network use becomes the "it" thing. We’ve all heard mutterings like, "email is dead" and "social media is killing email," but it’s just not the case, and there are plenty of reasons why (even if Google thinks it’s time to start over).

Symantec’s MessageLabs tells WebProNews there is a new targeted attack using emails pretending to be from the New York Times. MessageLabs Intelligence tracked the attack yesterday, which used emails pretending to come from the NYT’s "Times Reader" software, hitting six different domains. One domain was a public sector domain, one was a law firm, and three were to chemical companies, and one was an online gambling company in the UK.