Here are some horror stories and some recommendations to keep you on your toes when working your inbox and forwarding messages around to others.

A man working in a big company back in the 1990’s sent an email to his friend. Attached was a photo that was rated ‘M for Mature’ and some nasty remarks about his boss. When he pushed the send button in his email program, the message hit the email server, and instead of being sent to the person to whom it was addressed, it ended up being sent to everyone in the company.

Another man was sending email back and forth to his office sweetheart. While sending flirty messages back and forth to her, he received a message from his wife who also worked in the company. He must have gotten confused or typed over the to: line in the message, because his wife received a forwarded copy, from him, of his elicit conversations with his “friend with benefits.” Needless to say, she was not happy, so she forwarded it to a distribution list so that it landed on everyone’s desktops along with a line she added herself, “I’ll be taking some time off to hire a divorce lawyer for the next few days.”

Another guy sends his boss a message that is something his boss would not like anyone else to see. He wants to share it, so he uses the BCC line and blind copies a few people on the message. One of them fails to notice that the message was blind copied to him, so he replies-all and instantly it is revealed he was blind-copied.

A gigantic corporation was going out of business, and as they went down, they were ordered by the judge presiding over the lawsuit to make all past email messages available to the opposing counsel. Their IT shop’s solution? Hook up a search engine front end on the web and set up a database with every email message ever sent across their systems. Everyone on Earth was able to search it on some choice keywords and follow with great interest the private failings of so many fragile human beings.

The reality is that while you might not have any secrets that you are terrified will get out, you probably don’t want your private messages becoming public. These days, email is taken for granted as totally reliable and trustworthy. People treat it as though it is no big deal to send messages around to one another, bad-mouthing others, sharing secrets they promised to keep, or talking about their private affairs such as attending therapy sessions, flirting with each other, or other such things no one would want posted on the wall.

I recommend that everyone keep in mind the dangers of forwarded email, malfunctioning email, and untrustworthy coworkers to avoid humiliation, disgrace, and broken careers and families.

Here are some recommendations for you to follow at the office with email to help you survive:

• Never write anything in email, instant messaging, or any stored document that you would be embarassed to have read aloud on CNN or sent to everyone in the company by mistake.
• Never use BCC. Some silly person will invariably respond when they should not and reveal that they were blind-copied. If you must share something that you probably should not be sharing, then send it, then forward a copy of what you sent. That way there are two.
• Always assume what you write will be forwarded to someone who is assumed to also be an ally, and that it will make the rounds until whomever the message is about reads it.
• Before you forward a message, edit out everything that is absolutely unnecessary from the message. Don’t highlight parts or say “See below in red.” Instead, hack it to ribbons until only a few choice lines remain. Help protect others and yourself from forwarding things accidentally that will not be appreciated.
• Remember that any message you send is recorded on your company’s machines and can be pulled up even 100 years in the future. It is all backed up and carefully stored away.
• Keep in mind that the guys who administer the email system can read everything you write.
• Remember that if you are the target of a subpoena, you could end up in court forced to read your worst messages aloud.
• Do not forward messages to your boss or directs with “FYI” at the top and nothing else. No one wants to read the whole string of messages below your FYI. Instead, provide a one or two line summary at the top that tells them everything they need to know. If they want the context, let them look if they want. Most just want the summary.
• Pictures in your signature can increase the size of your messages exponentially. If your company has limits on how many megabytes of email can be in an inbox before the person “is thrown in email jail” and can no longer send until they delete or file them away, then your signature graphics probably make this problem much worse.
• Legal messages in your signature that are five or ten lines long at the bottom of your messages that say, “This message and its contents…” are hugely annoying. Most companies have a policy from their legal departments that messages contain such boilerplate. Most wise users of email ignore such policies since the boilerplate is irritating and makes messages unreadable on blackberries or other mobile devices, makes conversations difficult to follow, and is one of those lawyer things that never stands up in court anyway.
• Never discuss your personal finances, salary, medical condition, love life, vacation plans, or job hunting in company email. This will of course be the message accidentally exposed to the world.
• Never ever, ever use your company email as your email address while job shopping. Get a gmail or yahoo email account instead and check it from home. Don’t forward messages to and from such an address. You open up a can of electronic legal worms doing that.
• If someone forwards you something that contains an accidental revelation in the bottom, delete, forgive, and forget. Forwarding it around further just compounds the problem and will sow dissent. Saving and savoring is not a good idea either. Since work success depends on good relationships, it’s always better strategy to play nice even when others do not.
• If a message ticks you off, do not respond until you are no longer ticked off - however long that takes. Instead, pick up the phone.
• Never forward pictures, videos, jokes, political commentary or anything else to anyone ever at the office. Some people are less than honest about how they react to such things at work in order to stay friendly, and when you forward this sort of thing, they are offended but say nothing to you… to you. They say something to others.

One final bit of advice: always put in people’s addresses in the to: line after you are done editing so you do not accidentally send a message before you are finished.

A thousand years from now, email will no longer exist, for one reason or another. I’m in that group of people who believe that if email stopped working tomorrow, the workplace would probably improve. But for now, it is here to stay, and provides so much efficiency of communication that the downsides - the broken relationships - the rude communication - the time it takes to write what could have been spoken in 1/3 the time - and the expense of email systems - are all accepted as a cost of doing business. Perhaps one day, email will not be viewed so highly.