Michael Osterman of Osterman Research asks and answers this question on his blog.

“I believe the answer is no. In many ways, email is more database than communications tool, a repository of unstructured content that you can add to at will simply be sending me an email. If content is unwanted and unusable, such as spam, obviously it should be discarded. However, we all receive content in email that might not need a response right away, or that might be more useful when aggregated with other content.”

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A recent blog entry on the e-Discovery Team blog reminded me of this topic. The post talks about the dangers of exposing confidential metadata embedded in Office documents.

“For instance, a Word document containing secret comments they added, then hid, and then forgot to delete or “scrub” before production. “

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As if corporate IT departments don’t have enough to worry about, their staff is often on the receiving end of employee abuse. Most companies have clearly stated rules of proper business conduct documented in form of an employee manual or other written HR policy.

The rules covering electronic communication typically spell out the terms of use, appropriate and permissible content and usage limits or restrictions. These rules are driven by HR and business policy and more often follow specific regulatory and compliance requirements that must be monitored and enforced.

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Marshall Loeb at Marketwatch recently cited a 2006 survey of U.S. office workers and their dependence on email, with 75% of the survey participants stating that they “could not live without it”. He also quotes four instances from “Send: The Essential Guide to E-mail for Office and Home“, when it would be wise to stop typing and to pick-up the phone instead:

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This is an overdue follow-up to a previous post. In that post I looked at the security implications of email and how to protect the users from email security risks. This post is about:

Email Etiquette

Email is one of those business tools that is deemed intuitive enough that few companies consider employee training. Yet, newcomers and seasoned pros alike are often doing things that can drive the rest of us crazy.

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HP was forced to disclose its second quarter forecast before the scheduled official announcement date due to one of those unfortunate email address slip-ups. An email containing the latest financial results was accidentally sent to an unintended external recipient.

I am sure that many of us can sympathize with the employee’s mistake. The common use of multiple address books containing internal and external addresses often mixed with personal contacts in combination with the oh-so-handy recipient type-ahead feature of contemporary email clients make it very easy to send a message to the wrong address.

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