Hitting 'Send' Too Soon
The Wall Street Journal's Hitting 'Send' Too Soon (subscription required) notes that people who should know better still make some serious e-mail mistakes. Some suggestions they cite:
- "People tend to think of e-mail as being secured communication between the recipient and the person who's sending the e-mail — that's not the case."
- "Don't hit the 'send' button unless you would be comfortable having your mother, grandmother, or a competitor reading what you just wrote on the front page [of a newspaper]."
- "When I'm putting something into an e-mail to a client, I pretend I'm putting it on letterhead. Effectively it's going out on company letterhead, it just doesn't look like it when you're typing it."