Salon has an interesting article on what they describe as corporate email warfare (if you're not a Salon subscriber you'll probably see an advert before the article, either watch it or click the link in the top right to skip). I've encountered some of the things they talk about in the wild as it were. For example, the sending email late at night ploy. If you are working late then there is no point in hiding your light under a bushel and you might as well send the email then. On the other hand logging on from home via the vpn for a couple of minutes at 10pm to email the CEO is just not cricket. Of course sending email with cron jobs is always a big no no. Fortunately the people who try these sorts of things are generally not up to setting up cron correctly.

Coincidentally the New York Times also has an email related article today, which I can no longer find. This one was talking about the difficulty some people have with the social conventions for when an exchange of emails has ended or should end. Email I don't have a problem with, in many cases it's best just to treat it as fire and forget. IM is another kettle of fish though, I'm still getting the hang of that :)