Now that most businesses and organisations have adopted email, for many people it is the standard way of communicating within organisations, and also with external contacts.

In business, the formality of email messages tends to vary, between the semi-formal approach that was previously the domain of the memo, down to chatty exchanges that you might have with someone over the telephone or face to face.

Email messages are surprisingly permanent. Have a really good look through the contents of your mailbox and you might be surprised to see just how old some of those messages are. Would you have kept a paper inter-office memo for that length of time? Probably not. And the worrying thing is that most people give very little thought to the contents of an email message, even though it might linger around an organisation for several years.

Most corporate mail systems are backed up onto tape regularly, and those tape archives can stretch back for several years and allow access to mail that you had previously thought was gone forever. There have been several high-profile cases where archived emails have been recovered and used in legal cases.

However, it can be normal day-to-day email messages that can cause the most problems, with their offhand remarks and unguarded comments, thoughtless turns of phrase and careless wording. Care must be taken both when sending an email message, and, perhaps more importantly, when reading it. Try not to be too harsh if there's a change that you might have misinterpreted the sender's meaning.

One problem with less formal email is missed signals - the written message doesn't come with facial expressions or gestures that you would get in a face-to-face meeting, and there's no tone of voice to interpret as you could over the telephone. A great deal of human communication comes from these non-verbal signals and traditionally they help to make the message more clear. For example, irony and humour can be difficult to express in a mail message - many people get round this by using smileys such as :) to indicate humour - but not everyone knows what these mean, so they are not foolproof.

The following tips should help you avoid some of the pitfalls.

• Do check to see what your organisation's email policy is. Many organisations have rules about the types of message that can be sent and also if your email is monitored or screened.
• Do try to think about the message content before you send it out.  
• Do make sure that the content is relevant to the recipients. Nobody likes to receive junk email.
• Do be polite. Terseness can be misinterpreted.
• Do trim any quoted message down as much as possible.
• Do try to use humour and irony sparingly. You can use smileys such as :) or :( to indicate facial expressions, but make sure that the recipient understands what they mean.
• Do ensure that you have a relevant "Subject" line.
• Do try to quote from the original message where relevant. You can break the quoted message down into paragraphs and comment on them individually to make it clearer.
• Do be patient, especially with inexperienced email users. Give people the benefit of the doubt - just because you are familiar with email etiquette, it doesn't mean that they are.
• Do include a brief signature on your email messages to help the recipient understand who it is from, especially if you are dealing with someone you do not know very well.
• Do be careful when replying to mailing list messages, or to messages sent to many recipients. Are you sure you want to reply to the whole list?
• Do remember to delete anything that isn't needed or is trivial.
• Do remember to tell people the format of any attachments you send if they're anything other than basic Microsoft Office file types.
• Do tell your correspondent if you forward a message to somebody else to deal with, so they know who to expect a reply from.
• Do use emphasis where it’s useful to do so. If your email system doesn't allow bold or italics then a common convention is to use a *star* either side of the word you want to stress.
• Do understand that languages such as English differ in spelling between different countries. "Organisation" and "humour" are the correct spelling in British English, but in American English it would be "organization" and "humor". Non-native speakers of English may use a variety of national spellings.


• Don't reply to an email message when angry, as you may regret it later. Once the message has been sent, you will not be able to recover it.
• Don't keep mail on your server longer than necessary, especially large attachments.  
• Don't copy out an entire, long message just to add a line or two of text such as "I agree".
• Don't type in CAPITALS as this is considered to be SHOUTING. This is one of the rudest things you can do.
• Don't over-use punctuation such as exclamation marks ("!") as these are meant to be for emphasis. In particular avoid more than one exclamation mark ("!!"), especially if your email is quite formal. Also, over-use of the full-stop (e.g. "....") can make a message difficult to read.
• Don't send irrelevant messages, especially to mailing lists or newsgroups.
• Don't send large attachments without checking with the recipient first.
• Don't send excessive multiple postings to people who have no interest. This is known as "spamming" and is considered to be ignorant, and may lead to serious trouble with your Internet Service Provider (ISP) or IT department.
• Don't send chain letters or "make money fast" messages. There are several hoaxes about to do with viruses - never pass these on without checking with your IT department first.
• Don't criticize people's spelling, it is considered petty. Many people have no way of running a spell check on their messages and will make typos. Not all nationalities spell words in the same way.
• Don't conduct arguments in public, for example on a mailing list.
• Don't "flame" people by sending them abusive email messages.
• Don't make personal remarks about third parties. Email messages can come back to haunt you.
• Don't send unsuitable email or attachments, especially anything of a sexual nature as they may well be found by a third party later.
• Don't use an over-elaborate signature on your email message. Never, ever, use scanned images in a signature as these tend to be very large.
• Don't mark things as urgent if they aren't, because then when you really do have an urgent message it may not be treated in the way it deserves.
• Don't post your email address on web sites and other public parts of the Internet or you may be deluged with spam.