Emails: love ’em or hate ’em, they’re here to stay. And that’s the point. Many emails are written as if they are ephemeral, and then cause problems when they turn out to be permanent. It’s so easy just to dash something off, in the same tone as if you were chatting to a colleague at the water cooler.
A recent piece in the FT discusses how the message just doesn’t seem to have got through to many organisations and their employees. Most organisations have appropriate policies in place, but do little to enforce them, whether through training or otherwise. There is software available to check outgoing emails (a bit like reverse spam filtering) but it isn’t widely used. It also suffers from the some of the same problems as spam filtering: in particular, people don’t like it when a perfectly acceptable email doesn’t get through