Not that long ago, I did a blog entry looking at a suggestion from Bearing Point's information technology global solutions leader Rob Hillard suggesting that companies should replace one-on-one emails with a more collaborative system where you have many people in on the loop. According to Hillard, this would provide them with more legal protection.

Email is now turning into a real nightmare for lawyers, according to the Fulton County Daily Report. E-mails, text messages, BlackBerry communications all are potential time bombs because people simply don't know how to use them properly. They'll put stuff in that shouldn't go in, or say things they wouldn't say in front of other people or ina drafted memo. Like making the stupid mistake of putting stuff that's off the record into email.

The suggestion is to train people in email etiquette but I suspect the problem is more complex than that. People relate to email in that way because it's halfway between a letter and a conversation and many are not wired up to be more careful. As David Shipley and Will Schwalbe say in their book Send, email encourages people to lose their cool.

"On email, people aren't quite themselves: they are angrier, less sympathetic, less aware, more easily wounded, even more gossipy and duplicitous. Email has a tendency to encourage the lesser angels of our nature," they write.

"There's a reason for this. In a face-to-face (or voice-to-voice) conversation, our emotional brains are constantly monitoring the reactions of the person to whom we're speaking. We discern what they like and what they don't like. Email, by contrast, doesn't provide a Speedy real time channel for feedback. Yet the technology somehow lulls us into thinking such a channel exists. As Daniel Goleman, author of Social Intelligence told us, emailing puts people, in neurological terms, in a state of disinhibition. (In our non-scientific terms, it's cluelessness). When we're on email, the inhibiting circuits in our brains - which help us monitor and adapt to our audience's responses - have checked out.

"The big problem, of course, is that we aren't always aware of this. And by the time we are? Well, we've already probably hit that Send key."