Send: The Essential Guide to Email for Office and Home

From this essential guidebook's opening sentence—"Bad things can happen on email"—Shipley and Schwalbe make all too clear what can go wrong. E-mail's ubiquity, with casual and formal correspondence jumbled in the same inbox, makes misunderstandings common; e-mail's inexpressive, text-only format doesn't help. Given its brief history, there's no established etiquette for usage, which is why this primer is so valuable. It promises the reader hope of becoming more efficient and less annoying, reducing danger of a career-ending blunder. Brisk, practical and witty, the book aims to improve the reader's skills as sender and recipient: devising effective subject lines and exploring "the politics of the cc"; how to steer clear of legal issues; and how to recognize different types of attachments. Using real-life examples from flame wars and awkward exchanges (including their own), Shipley and Schwalbe (op-ed editor of the New York Times and Hyperion Books' editor-in-chief) explain why people so often say "incredibly stupid things" in their outgoing messages. "Email has a tendency to encourage the lesser angels of our nature," they note. They also offer "seven big reasons to love email," along with quick guides to instant messaging and e-mail technology, all the while urging us to "think before [we] send." (Apr.)