By Steve Stewart
steve@decaturdaily.com· 340-2444

I was lucky to learn the most important lesson about e-mail years ago, before I made a fool of myself.

I wrote a candid e-mail to a friend that I did not expect anyone else to see, but I did not ask him to keep it to himself.

He forwarded it to a group, including me — which is how I learned that you should put nothing in e-mail that you expect to keep private.

Fortunately, my e-mail wasn’t candid enough to cause a
problem.

If “Send” had been available then, it might have spared me that learning experience.

The authors say e-mail is not reliably private and may live forever. They also point out that it can get you or your company into legal trouble, even if you just carelessly and inaccurately imply that you are doing something wrong.

“Send” was written by the deputy editorial page editor of The New York Times, David Shipley, and the editor in chief of Hyperion Books, Will Schwalbe.

Its overriding messages are to be careful what you write in e-mail and to send the same kinds of messages you would like to receive.

Ethics and etiquette

The same points could have been made about snail mail, and probably were, by advisers on etiquette, ethics and law in decades past.

But because electronic mail
represents most of the correspondence most people write
these days, this advice needs repeating specifically in regard to e-mail.

Some advice applies exclusively to e-mail.

If you send multiple messages to the same person, for example, be aware that he may read your last message first because of the order they show up in his inbox. Don’t send bad news late on a Friday and ruin someone’s weekend.

When deciding whom to send “cc” copies to, consider pecking order and whether you are writing to a peer, a superior or a subordinate. Be brief but not cold; you often need to include a pleasantry. Know when and how to stop a cycle of e-mails before it gets ridiculous.

Despite its subtitle, this book is more about business e-mail than personal. It won’t tell you how to flirt by e-mail, or what message you send by immediately answering a personal e-mail or by waiting.

The book is easy to read and sometimes funny, but it’s more a utility than an amusement. Its true, bad examples provide some of the most interesting reading.

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