The art of office e-mail war

The Smoking Gun

The flipside of this access to anyone in a company is that e-mail creates a record of one's thoughts and actions that, in most cases, is permanent. An e-mail can thus become a smoking gun, an electronic paper trail that later comes back to haunt the sender.

A recent case in point is the group of Merrill Lynch analysts who allegedly admitted in e-mails that they had little faith in certain stocks that they were optimistically touting to investors. Those same analysts may now face fraud charges brought by New York Attorney General Elliot Spitzer, who has already publicly humiliated them by bringing the e-mails to light.

"You have to realize that every e-mail you write is evidence," says Suzanne Stefanac, an interactive television consultant. "Someone might use it to further their own ends. You have to be careful about what you say and what you mean to say."

That evidence can also get you fired. According to one longtime human resources director for various companies, e-mail is the first place that companies go when they want to find evidence to get rid of you. "I can't tell you how many times I went through the computer files of senior vice presidents," she says. "I wasn't comfortable with [the idea], but I was told, 'we have to get rid of somebody. We have to do it.'"

Ultimately, all this virtual conniving can have a devastating effect on the environment of networked companies, says Peter Lyman, a professor at UC Berkeley's School of Information Management and Systems.

"Networked organizations are built on trust," says Lyman. "E-mail can stretch or even destroy that level of trust that we need to work together."

The Stealth Attack

Perhaps the most dangerous abuse of that trust happens with the so-called bcc, or blind carbon copy, which allows the sender to e-mail copies of a correspondence to other people without the original recipient's knowledge.

The blind carbon copy is so widely despised and prone to misuse that some companies disable the function on their e-mail systems. However, companies are powerless to eliminate these kinds of stealth attacks. Even without the automatic bcc function, it's easy to manually forward a copy of the message after sending out the original.

"The blind copy is used extensively and very politically," says David Kaiser, CEO of RespondTV, a company that produces software for interactive television. He first noticed abuses of the bcc in 1994 when he became an executive at AOL, which by then had a full-blown e-mail culture, well before most other companies were using e-mail at all. Often, the blind carbon copy was used in conjunction with a reprimand sent in an e-mail.

"It was typically worded in a very constructive way, like you went a little too far in that discussion with so and so,'" Kaiser explains. "But then the note would be blind copied to that person's superior, to somebody in the legal department, and to somebody in the accounting department."

Kaiser, 48, has watched the evolution of e-mail in the workplace since the 1970s, when he worked at the NASA Ames Research Center. "Then it was used mainly as a collaborative tool, to share data with people all around the country. It wasn't used for casual conversation like it is now."

Now, he says, e-mail is used more like the telephone, a means to communicate what you might normally say to someone in person. As a result, it frequently -- and sometimes intentionally -- gets stretched beyond its limitations.

At AOL, the e-mail torrent got out of control. "Nobody was talking to anybody," he says. "They were just sending e-mails all the time. You got hundreds of them a day. There was no way even to read them all."

Ultimately, he predicts there will be a swing back to more face-to-face conversation at companies as the downsides of e-mail and other electronic communications, like instant messaging, become more apparent.

"I would scream bloody murder if someone tried to take away my e-mail," Kaiser says. "But at the same time I realize there are some dark aspects to it. It can have a very divisive effect on corporate culture."

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