Corporate Email Etiquette - Dead or Alive?

mbravo writes "I work in a largish company, heavily into IT, and in a complex and quickly changing market. Employees are predominantly in the 30 or younger age-bracket, and as you might expect we rely on a lot of internal e-mail. Despite that, lately I'm finding myself increasingly frustrated by a complete lack of e-mail etiquette in the company. A typical thread might look like a hundred-message-long chain of one-line replies, with full quoting and hundreds of recipients in the 'To:' field. It feels like it is happening more and more often. I don't seem to be seeing much success in explaining to my co-workers what the problem is here. How do you deal with this at your place of business, and does your company care? Does the company take any policing or educating measures?"

Comments

Re:My experience

[orclevegam]

My experience in the defense industry has shown me that long, full-quote e-mails are often useful for defending yourself against another's incompetence. That unfortunately is the reason most quoted for using e-mail in the first place. Most upper management (and middle management) view e-mail not as a communication tool, but as a way to CYA. The phrase "Send it to me in an e-mail." is uttered far to often not because they need reminding or somehow didn't hear you just tell them that, but because they want it in writing.

Re:With gmail

[gnick]

That would be nice, but is prohibitive for many companies. My company, for example, does not allow e-mail outside the firewall unencrypted. On this side, we have Lotus Notes which approaches zero usability as e-mail etiquette drops. We have periodic training for users mostly scheduled by how ugly things have gotten. Some employees, of course, never learn when it is or is not appropriate to use the "Reply to All" button, but there's no action taken on the corporate scale. The only way to handle it is to send them to /dev/null and force them to pick up a phone to follow up on anything that was actually important.

Re:Different tool

[samkass]

Note that if you're a publicly traded company, SarbOx requires that your IM server keep logs of all employee correspondence for a certain amount of time. There are several Jabber/XMPP servers that can be configured to conform to SarbOx, but I'm not aware of any which do with a default install. You really don't want to be the one sent to jail when you can't produce the requested IM records during the court proceedings.

Part of the solution

[ChristTrekker]

In other words, "Outlook style" is the problem. Outlook QuoteFix is the solution.

Re:Get gmail

[TheRaven64]

For corporate email, the route ought to be an SSL connection (with an out-of-band distributed certificate) to your internal mail server, then on to the mail delivery agent running on the same machine (or forwarded over SSL to another internal machine), then to the user's computer via HTTPS webmail or POP3/IMAP over SSL. If it goes on to any computers that your IT department don't control then you are doing something wrong.

TFA was about internal corporate email, not about personal email.