A lot of people spend a significant amount of time in the office sending emails, but there are a significant portion of them that are so badly written, confusing, or just plain pointless that co-workers spend valuable periods of time every day figuring out what someone else has just sent. We thought we’d offer five tips to help turn your emails into something people will benefit from.

1) Learn grammar and spelling.

In all honesty, this is probably the number one reason many people find that their writing is generally disregarded. If you can’t spell or construct proper sentences, from emails to writing copy for www.o2.co.uk, people are not going to take you seriously in an professional environment.

2) Don’t send pointless emails.

Some people will waste the time of their co-workers simply by repeatedly sending emails about topics that don’t require one. Anything from the water-cooler being empty to asking questions you could Google the answers to is going to slow people down and frustrate them.

3) Use it formally, and only for business.

Don’t send emails in a formal or large office (100 employees or more) to announce birthdays, newly-born children, or what your dog did last week. Keep everything to an informal channel. Retirements and serious personal incidents or absences are fine, however.

4) Don’t use mailing lists unless you have to.

Having an email only relevant to two members of a forty-person team sent to every one of them because you’re too lazy to enter two addresses instead of one is ridiculous, so try and avoid this – irrelevant emails just clutter up people’s inboxes and waste their time.

5) Keep the extras to a minimum.

Long signatures and warnings about confidential information aren’t needed when sending emails internally. People know who you are, and if not, add a name and job title. As for the confidentiality – it’s an internal email, so it’s going to be career suicide for anyone who forwards it outside the company, regardless – but this is a preference that shifts from business to business, so it’s not as crucial.

Hopefully this will improve your in-office communication. If not, buy a loud-hailer, or an inflatable mallet!

The lifehacker blog asks its readers to cast their vote for the best email client.

We’re interested in email clients, the tools you use to access and process your email—not so much the actual email provider. In some cases the line between client and provider is very distinct: Outlook is strictly a client that you must access an email server to use. In other cases the line is less distinct. Gmail, for example, is both an email service provided by Google and a web-based email client that you could use to manage other web and server-based email accounts (so it would still count). When placing your vote for your favorite tool please keep that in mind: we want to hear about your favorite client, not service.

I’m curious to see if webmail interfaces will win over rich-clients.

Click here to vote in the comments section of LifeHacker using this format: VOTE: [your_favorite_email_client]

Kudos to our team here at Permessa. Everyone worked extra hard and many long hours over the last few weeks to get the newest release of Permessa Control! out the door just in time for Lotusphere.

Permessa Control! v6 is the Most Comprehensive Monitoring, Reporting and Compliance Solution for IBM Lotus Domino and Lotus Sametime available today.

LOTUSPHERE, ORLANDO, FL. (PR WEB) January 18, 2010 – New versions of the award-winning Permessa Control! products were announced today by Permessa Corporation at Lotusphere in Orlando, Florida. These products enable enterprises to both lower costs and improve compliance with their mission-critical messaging systems. Permessa Email Control! won the 2009 Lotus Award for Best Tool or Utility and was a finalist for the prestigious 2009 IBM Beacon Award. Permessa IM Control! was a finalist for the 2009 Lotus Award for Best Collaboration product.

See the full announcement here.

Happy New Year!

Only a couple of weeks left until Lotusphere is upon us again.

Permessa will be exhibiting at Booth# 326, featuring live demonstrations of the newest enhancements to our award-winning Email and IM product line.

This year, we have teamed up with Mayflower Software and Sherpa Software to host a “Tailgate Party” on Sunday, right before the Welcome Reception.

Please register here to join us.

Update: Here’s a map to the party. Given the current cold-snap in Florida, we may relocate to an indoor location. Stay tuned.

IBM Lotus just recently released Lotus Traveler 8.51 which provides support for a wide range of mobile devices, but most importantly the iPhone.

I’m sure there was a collective sigh amongst Domino admins, getting their iPhone touting execs back onto corporate email. But the catch-up game continues, as the cool new Droid arrives on the scene. Traveler doesn’t yet officially support Android devices, although both Traveler and Android have ActiveSync support. Ed Brill mentioned on his blog that Android support is coming, but what to do in the meantime? There are a number of 3rd party apps that can bridge the gap – Touchdown by NitroDesk is one of them.

The droidStory blog has a post on how to get it working and the trade-offs and compromises of the solution.

It seems that Android and Droid are everywhere these days, and that’s no wonder given an estimated $100M advertisement budget committed by Verizon for the Droid campaign alone. On top of that, we just love new gadgets and the buzz and excitement that go with it. Who doesn’t want to join the party?

Yet, with all that media noise it gets harder to objectively decide what features and functionality really matter the most before committing to a new smart-phone and the obligatory carrier contract. No question, the new Android phones and the Moto Droid are fantastic and give you just a glimpse of things to come, but the Blackberry Storm is in many ways an equal contender on a more mature platform. The launch of the original Storm last year was a bit of a flop – mainly because the software was just not ready for prime time and subsequent patches were slow to market. Here are 5 reasons why you should still look at the Storm when shopping for your next smart-phone.

Read the rest of this entry »