By Eva Ciabattoni

In the midst of the Hurricane Katrina disaster in Louisiana, FEMA Administrator Michael Brown e-mailed his staff: “If you’ll look at my lovely FEMA attire, you’ll really vomit. I am a fashion god.” And the country read it in the media in later reports on the FEMA response.

The defining features of e-mail - speed, simplicity and the illusion of privacy - are the very things that got Brown into trouble.

The New York Times Op-Ed Page Editor, David Shipley, and Editor in Chief of Hyperion Books, Will Schwalbe, provide a navigation guide to avoid the minefields of this evolving technology in “Send: The Essential Guide to Email for Office and Home” (Alfred A. Knopf, 2007).

The authors begin by analyzing e-mail’s place in the communications spectrum. E-mail is an efficient tool for conveying essential information to individuals or groups. Before sending e-mail, consider whether it is the best medium for a particular message. For a declaration of love, a letter might be better. A termination notice should be handled face to face. Instant messaging might be a more collaborative way to handle communication within a working group. The telephone is better suited for delicate negotiations because it can convey nuances.

“Send” contends that not enough attention is paid to the details of e-mails - from the To, Cc, Bcc and Subject lines to the salutation, form of address, body, tone and the closings, signatures and attachments.

The subject line, for example, should be clear and convey the message precisely. If it does not, it’s a sign that the e-mail is not as concise as it could be, or that it might need to be broken into several separate e-mails, each with its own topic. For clarity and legality, it’s important to update the subject line as the topic changes. (By contrast, cyber-dating gurus Ellen Fein and Sherrie Schneider say that women should never update the subject line as it reveals too much effort.)

The occasionally dry subject matter is livened up with anecdotes of e-mail mishaps. There’s a great deal of schadenfreude to be had from reading these e-boo-boos. Chances are they are worse than or at least equal to the misdemeanors most readers have committed - and they got published for the world to see.

“Send” repeatedly stresses that e-mail is not as ephemeral or intimate as we think. Even when a message is deleted, it hangs around in an archive, on a server or on your hard drive. People forget how easily e-mails can be forwarded to large groups of people.

The authors offer interesting data about the psychology of e-mail that explains why e-mail exchanges can spiral out of control so quickly. Research has demonstrated that a neurological quirk makes the pain we receive feel more intense than the pain we produce - that even if we think we are responding in kind to a peevish e-mail, chances are great that we are actually escalating the conflict.

Both experienced and novice e-mail users will find the book filled with valuable tips and reminders. The bottom line: Don’t send e-mail you would not like to see on the front page of the newspaper.