Consider your business e-mail as being sent to a company bulletin board. And your message or documents can be stored for years on back-up disks and tapes.
To prevent yourself from doing anything that can hurt you or your organization, consider these helpful hints:
- E-mail should always be considered public, not private. Don’t ever write anything you wouldn’t want everyone in your office to see.
- When replying to someone’s message, check the list of recipients before you respond. Oftentimes, e-mail is automatically copied to a pre-programmed distribution list. Your messages can be forwarded without your knowledge.
- If a message you’ve received is personal or even informal, let the sender know you’ll be forwarding his or her message before you pass it along to someone else.
SOURCE: American Media Inc., West Des Moines, Iowa
Workforce, July 1998, Vol. 77, No. 7, p. 38.