So many problems arise from quick and thoughtless e-mails. To reiterate, the purpose of this article is to remind you to think before you click send.
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Don’t forward other peoples e-mails without their permission or share their personal information. Sometimes, without realising it, we copy someone new in on an e-mail ‘conversation’. It might contain personal information or personal communication that someone else shared with you only three levels down and you didn’t realise that you were now allowing others to read it. Either delete all but the most recent message when forwarding it, or re-read the older messages before forwarding it to make sure nothing personal is in those messages. If someone doesn’t e-mail you back or is suddenly ‘off’ with you, you may want to re-read some of your forwarded messages.
If you are writing the e-mail when you are angry review it carefully. Take time to cool down before sending it. Check that you are not replying to something that’s designed to insult you. If so, the person sending it is looking for a reaction, so don’t. These things generally go away if you ignore them.
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Spam
Don’t reply to spam, even to ask to be taken off a mailing list.
Spammers buy lists of millions of e-mail addresses. Harvesting programmes collect these addresses wherever they can online, in chat rooms, on message boards, from chain e-mails and registrations. Many of them are old and don’t work. If you reply one of two things happen. You either have sent a reply to a fake address the spammers have used to send their e-mails from, or you have let them know that your address is a good one and you will receive many more messages. They will even sell your address on for more money, since they can guarantee that you have read the spam message you received.
Now you know how and why, invest in a good anti-spam program.
Privacy
How private is the message you are sending? Are you willing to have others read it and forward it on to others without your permission?
E-mails get mis-delivered all the time, and sometimes the people we send them to share our communications without asking us first. So don’t say anything in an e-mail that you wouldn’t willingly allow someone else to read. If you are going to share something very private, it is always the best idea to do this over the phone, or in person.
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Coming back to haunt you
When someone applies for a job, the recruiter will sometimes run a web search first, particularly if there is something of interest on their CV, for example, Kylie Minogues’s personal dresser. There have been many cases where old messages posted on message boards and other websites when the candidate was much younger has come back to haunt them. Its always a good idea – and fun too – to put your name in a search engine and see what has been said about you.
A different story
One of the biggest problems online is that few of us think between the process of typing a message and sending it. We all think rude and inappropriate things but generally don’t say them out loud. When we are actually looking at someone in the eye we imagine how they would respond and how others around us would respond if we actually said what we were thinking. But when it’s just us and the computer screen, it’s a whole different story.
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Everyone has things they wish they could say, but usually if we do we wish we could take it back. On e-mail you never really can – it lives on forever in archives and such like. At the very least, wait 24 hours before sending a message you know will have potential repercussions. Hopefully this will allow you to rationalise and calm down.
So, always think before you click that ‘send’ button.
