Computer boffins often talk about how e-mail has revolutionised the world. It has allowed us to send Excel files to each other rather than stand there feeding paper into the fax for hours, and paved the way for concepts such as “global communities”, “online dating” and spending all night and the next morning discussing The Hobbit.

What computer boffins don’t spend that much time discussing is etiquette. For the rest of us, however, e-mail has become a minefield, a place where it is easier than ever to make contact with people you hardly know and therefore twice as easy to offend, be offended or make an idiot of yourself.

With the rise of e-mail, we have seen the demise of other forms of communication: the rambling hour-long phone call, even the face-to-face conversation. Whole relationships can now be conducted in the shadow of keyboard and screen. Is there a right and a wrong way, we at The Times wondered. Here is our guide.

AT WORK

I say “work” but, actually, nobody does any work any more. They just send e-mails to their friends all day while pretending to have a job. The only work done in an office is carried out by unpaid work experience kids who are not considered responsible enough to have access to a computer.

To give the impression that you have a job when all the time you’re having a six-handed online discussion about where next to go on holiday, type very fast and straight-facedly in the manner of the young David Helfgott in the film Shine. Periodically glare or sigh at your computer screen.

Don’t sit there chuckling to yourself because somebody has forwarded you an amusing list of World Cup TV Rules for Wives and Girlfriends. This will give you away as a skiver, and those lists are never funny anyway.

Always have a work-related document open on your desktop for when the managing director creeps up on you from behind to check that you’re not sending e-mails all day. The MD, incidentally, spends his day ordering clothes from the online Boden catalogue but, being in a position of responsibility, needs to give the impression that he is very busy. He does this by leaving all work-related e-mails routinely unanswered for weeks.

Giving the impression that you are very busy is one of the keys to success in the world of work. Although it is exceptionally rude to ignore an e-mail for more than a day unless you are in hospital, you can do it to junior staff because they can’t fire you. It also makes them feel impotent and insecure, just how you like them.

In between buying easyJet flights and talking to your therapist online it may occasionally be necessary to send a genuine work-related e-mail. The way you format these missives will make or break your professional reputation. As an exceptionally busy person you:

never insert a joke into a business e-mail and then write “JOKE!” or “NOT!” in brackets.

The second key to success in the world of work is the ability to demonstrate either a laid-back razor wit in any electronic communications (if you are employed in a so-called creative industry) or no sense of humour at all (everything else). Whichever category you fall into, never ever use the French word sans instead of “without” and avoid all visual jokes (unless you’re Danish, Spanish or Brazilian, in which case the inclusion of a smiley face in an e-mail is seen by the British as an acceptable part of your strange fun-loving culture).

Make a point of spelling your e-mail correctly, because you don’t want to be confused with an illiterate teenage sender of text messages. Unless you’re in PR.

Because you intend to be a big cheese one day, you do not have an electronic signature. It would be like Harold Pinter sticking Famous Playwright at the bottom of his e-mails.

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