Could your emails bite you on the butt?
Wednesday, May 31st, 2006
At CNet, lawyer Eric J. Sinrod is astounded 
by the things that people still write in emails.
Despite several high-profile cases, many continue to commit things to email—a lasting, storable medium—that would make a more prudent person flinch.
He recalls the antitrust case against Microsoft in the late 1990s in which “Attorneys for the Department of Justice skillfully used Gates’ own e-mails against him to paint Microsoft’s co-founder as a predatory monopolist.”
In more current affairs, US public service employee David Safavian will be proved guilty on the basis of his own emails alone, according to the Department of Justice.
He has a theory about why unguarded practices continue:
E-mail has become ubiquitous. Very busy people often send and receive e-mail messages more than they actually talk to others. E-mail thus becomes a substitute for conversation. Writers of e-mail messages become very comfortable and chatty, forgetting or not appreciating that the e-mail messages live on.
Most of us don’t play for the same stakes as Bill Gates or David Safavian.
If we followed Sinrod’s advice only to write emails that could happily appear on the front page of a newspaper we would die of boredom by a thousand cuts before ever ending up in trouble, but some caution never goes astray.
And, really, the rules are pretty simple. Don’t send an email or operate heavy machinery of any kind when you are angry. Keep slanderous gossip about workmates out of your email. Restrict it to the water-cooler where it belongs. Leave your feelings about your boss with your therapist and not in your Sent Mail folder. That kind of thing.
Of course, you are already doing that, aren’t you?
Tags: Bill Gates, email, evidence, keeping it nice, prudence, safavian, self-incrimination