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.

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.

Cisco announced today at its Collaboration Summit the launch of new enterprise collaboration products that further round out its already strong portfolio of IP telephony, real-time collaboration and media server solutions.  The new products include hosted email and social networking for the enterprise and puts Cisco in direct competition with Microsoft, IBM, Google and many other start-ups.

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A recent ethical phishing experiment shows a surprising 100% success rate on bypassing anti-spam filters. The experiment highlights how simple, small-scale spear-phishing campaigns easily bypass corporate security filters and that users continue to take the bait.

This scenario was an invitation from Linkedin, posing as an invitation from Bill Gates to join his network. Linkedin was selected due to availability, and the fact that it is a social network recognized by most executives. This selection of Linkedin was also based on the fact that linked-in email should be already identified by most existing email system(s), and this may have helped delivery through into the mailbox.

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