A New Discipline in Email Etiquette
Creating Confidence in Enterprise Email
By Peter Brockmann, Brockmann & Company
Published April 2007, Posted May 2007

Abstract:

Email has been shown to be a powerful Internet service and an accelerator of commerce, productivity, social interactions, news and amusement. Some call it the Internet’s "killer app."

It has also in recent years, demonstrated its ability to deliver and broadcast computer viruses, worms, fraud, socially engineered deceptions, identity thefts and global confidence schemes. It seems the service’s elegant design as a system to just deliver properly formed messages to the addressees requested by the sender has been greatly abused.

Spam is the embodiment of that abuse of the email service and the best definition that I've seen is to “indiscriminately send unsolicited, unwanted, irrelevant, or inappropriate email messages, especially commercial advertising in mass quantities. Noun: electronic 'junk mail'.”

Spam affects virtually all of the 1.1 billion Internet users every day. Sadly, the typical email inboxes are assaulted with invitations to click here, download that, visit this site, just email your social security and credit card numbers here or there, participate in this nefarious fraud or that one.

For enterprises, where email has been proven to be a very effective mechanism to communicate with all manner of audiences including employees, potential employees, retirees, customers, prospects, former customers, suppliers and coworkers the electronic correspondence service seems to have been losing its potency and business impact, at a time when our economy can least afford it.

This report, the first in a series, reviews email integrity myths and establishes the case for improving the users’ email experience.