2 JUNE 2007, Page 28

It will never be buried

Lloyd Evans SEND: THE HOW, WHY, WHEN AND WHEN NOT OF EMAIL by David Shipley and Will Schwalbe Canongate, £9.99, pp. 241, ISBN 9781841959948 © £7.99 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 Ivhy a book at all? This guide to email etiquette, written by a pair of New York Times hacks, ought to exist as a viral attachment bouncing around the world from computer to computer. It kicks off with Jo Moore's notorious and oft-misquoted email. Here's the exact wording: 'It is now a very good day to get out anything we want to bury. Councillors' expenses?' It's the details that make this sorry little haiku so grisly. The verb 'bury' is spectacularly tasteless and the macabre contrast between the epoch-shifting events unfolding in New York and the parochial timbre of councillors' expenses gives it a final gruesome seal of insensitivity. The timing, 14.55, indicates that Ms Moore sent her message shortly after the second tower had been hit. Perhaps with one tower in flames it was only a fair-to-moderate day for bad news. And then things got a whole lot better.

The illusion that undid her is that emails are transient, like bubbles, when in fact they have the permanence of lapidary inscriptions. Once sent, an email is forever. This book is full of advice about how to use the medium courteously and safely. In America, a multimillion-dollar drug lawsuit hinged on the implications of an email sent by an executive. Do I have to look forward to spending my waning years writing checks to fat people worried about a lung problem?' It was taken as an admission of guilt. Once an investigation begins, employees are served with a 'freeze letter' forbidding them from deleting emails. Then the Feds move in with complex new spyware that scours a firm's collected inboxes for suspicious phrases: 'can't sleep', 'high blood-pressure', 'I have serious concerns', 'can we get away with it?' 'DELETE TIM EMAIL!!!' and, my favourite, 'they'll never find out.' I bet Yates of the Yard has read that a few times.

Because email is emotionally neutral, it's a chaotic playground for paranoia. `So glad you invited me to the meeting' could express simple gratitude or, if the meeting was a disaster, bitter sarcasm. Even please and thank you can be loaded with unstable materials: 'Would you please remember to include me on the email whenever you respond to a customer' conveys a sense of exasperation. You've been told this before, it says. Why can't you remember this? Is it so hard? 'Thank you for making sure I get the report' has an edge to it because it's a command crudely cloaked in premature gratitude.

Of course that advice would apply equally well to any written communication and one of the faults of this book is that it keeps wandering off piste. When the authors want a model for 'the perfect email' they quote memos written by JFK nearly half a century ago. The extinct president still exercises some mysterious hold over the American psyche: a clumsy little note sent to Robert Macnamara is described as 'austere, simple and powerful' while a gushier one to Khrushchev about a joint space programme is 'expansive, complex and lyrical'. Whole chapters are full of advice apparently aimed at dunces. When emailing, we're told, always be polite. If you haven't met the recipient think carefully how to address him Resist the temptation to start a job application, 'Yo Bob!'. And don't use a word if you don't know what it means. Of the 'five words that almost everyone misuses' the most startling is 'penultimate' which many Americans apparently think means 'really great'.

This is a strange little book: timely, earnest, fitfully entertaining, curiously pedantic, diffuse for long stretches, but sprinkled with diverting titbits like the discovery that if you type (8 ^ (I) you've got Homer Simpson. (Turn it through 90 degrees.) It may not look very interesting on the page of this magazine, but when you do it on your own computer you get a curious sense of achievement. Well, I did.