Email Etiquette: Read This Before You Hit 'Send'

As for mechanical pet peeves, avoid the overuse of emoticons, proliferation of chain letters and virus hoaxes (check Snopes.com before forwarding any) and, last but not least, putting addresses on long cc: lists where they are sitting ducks for spammers -- use bcc: instead.

Get Personal

However, email conventions are not as interesting as the deeper problem: the use of email to avoid -- or even complicate -- more personal contact. It's a mistake that can cost you dearly in your career.

Email borrows the form of a paper memo (now defunct, to the joy of our arboreal population). Therefore, it's the literary equivalent of business-casual dress. It's an informal, mostly declarative medium for communicating facts and gathering suggestions.

But because memos were once internal communiques, recipients had frequent meetings where face-to-face encounters created context and allowed for graceful correction, as well as social bonding and repair.

Today, however, business email reaches outside institutional walls, so the context for both style and social clues is missing. Email may be easy, quick and inexpensive, but then, so are most traps.

Humans being what we are -- that is, essentially cheap and lazy -- email has become a catchall, and therein lies the trap.

Email gets overused, and often it's the exclusive means of communication when a variety of media would be more appropriate to the task. In its most innocuous guise, groups of coworkers are reduced to bonding via forwarded jokes and YouTube antics instead of meeting face to face.