2 key points about dangerous email:
1) Chances are, your emails never go away. If you use Gmail, for instance, Google has stated that they still keep the emails you delete. With other email apps or servers, I don’t know, but if I were you, I would think about email as something that lives out there beyond my “delete” button.
2) Even more important – that person who’s your friend today may not be your friend next month, and once you hit “send,” you’ve lost control of that email, and he or she can do whatever they want with it.
I’m as guilty as anyone, and I have to constantly remind myself that if it’s a sensitive or confidential subject, to pick up the phone or schedule a face-to-face meeting instead of sending an email. You can find out much more about the do’s and don’t’s of email in my new book and I would encourage you to get it right away.
From this moment, consider your email a platform that everyone can see. Never send anything private, critical, or something that could damage a relationship. Most of all, if it was read on the evening news, would it be embarrassing or damage your reputation?
I can’t begin to count the number of leaders forced to step down because of something inappropriate in an email message. And don’t think “inappropriate” always means sexual. It can mean a wide range of things that, if revealed publicly, could be embarrassing – and sometimes, actually illegal.
You’ve been warned.
This article on dangerous email originally appeared here, and is used by the author’s kind permission.
