A guide to the rules of emailing, with helpful tips on how to avoid the pitfalls of the mis-sent message or the love note that didn't quite work, has shot straight to the top of the American bestseller lists.
Such is the thirst for guidance on such a tricky area that Send: The How, Why, When - and When Not - of E-Mail shot into the top 10 of the New York Times bestseller books list within 48 hours of its publication last week. The book, published in Britain next month, tries to settle many contested questions about how to deal with the email epidemic and how to manage the mistakes it breeds.
The authors, Will Schwalbe and David Shipley, have put together a volume to tackle most aspects of 'netiquette'. Some of their advice concerns technical decorum, such as deciding whether or not to 'copy someone else in' on a discussion.
Other hints take a higher moral tone; for instance, the book says an emailer should never mention anyone in an email that they would not be happy to show the content to.
Controversially, Schwalbe and Shipley mount a defence of the exclamation mark in an email. They argue it brings a touch of much-needed warmth. Always choose 'Hooray!!!' over 'Hooray', the book urges, because email 'has a dulling quality that almost necessitates kicking everything up a notch just to bring it to where it would normally be'.
In general, though, this is a guide that counsels against all heavy emotional content. Emails are not private and so 'flaming', or aggressive emailing in anger, is often regretted at leisure, it reminds users, while capital letters should be avoided too. 'When words are written in CAPITAL LETTERS it means THE WRITER IS SHOUTING AT YOU,' Schwalbe and Shipley point out.
'Companies seem to feel especially exposed by email,' Schwalbe told The Observer this weekend. 'After all, it just takes one person to leak a careless email from inside a company for the whole organisation to be dragged through the mud. And yet it might have been written by an employee who has only been there for a week.'
Last summer lovesick e-swain Joseph Dobbie embarrassed himself on a global scale when he tried to romance a young woman he had just met at a party. His purple prose, which included the line, 'I know that it makes me feel good to believe that maybe, if you are ever upset, knowing that I will be keeping your smile alive might help you through', made the IT designer a minor celebrity once the object of his affections passed his email on to her sister, who became the first link in a very long chain.
A recent survey found that more than half of those asked spent two hours a day looking at emails while a quarter had at least 200 messages in their inbox at any time because they have no time to clear them. 'Ten years ago we weren't doing this as a society at all,' said Schwalbe. 'I am a moderate emailer and yet I probably deal with around 80 a day. That makes about 45,000 a year, so I understand why there is a backlash. But the truth is we are not going to stop using them.'
According to recent analysis, email overtook the telephone in the office three years ago, while research from The Radicati Group has found that around one in every six people on the planet uses email, resulting in around 2 million emails going out every second. While several leading company directors have said that they no longer look at emails and now regard them as counter-productive, Schwalbe says that for most of us, ignoring our inbox is a luxury we can't afford.
'You can be sure the same chief executives who suggest this approach still expect their staff to react pretty quickly to the emails that they send out,' he said. 'So they are not necessarily the right people for us to take advice from.'
Among the best tips offered are to steer clear of overdone sincerity and not to annoy by teasingly starting an email in the subject field. Containing a whole, brief message within a subject field is applauded, however.
The authors of Send claim that, by simply sending out better emails, better and - crucially - fewer emails will be returned anyway. 'We also all need to ask questions about whether we need to send an email at all,' says Schwalbe.
Whoops ...
Joseph Dobbie wrote to a woman he met at a party last year: 'Your smile is the freshest of my special memories. I will keep it with me when I need to find a smile of my own.' The recipient, Kate Winsall, found it so can't-bear-to-look cringing that she forwarded it to friends, who spread it around the world.
Claire Swire In 2000 the solicitor sent emails to Bradley Chait recounting their intimate encounter and spelling out her sexual tastes. 'Lucky I swallow,' she said. Chait forwarded the emails to six friends and it was soon being read by millions.
Jo Moore Minutes after planes hit the World Trade Centre, the Labour spin doctor, right, spun too far with an email telling officials it was a 'good day to get anything bad out we want to bury'. She was effectively sacked on the orders of Downing Street in February 2002.
David Smith
· Send will be published by Canongate Books on 19 May, price £9.99.
