E-mail can make your career dangerous

Sometimes bad emails can harm senior characters. For example, Steven Heyer, the former chief executive of the Starwood hotel system, had to resign last month because corporate executives asked him to explain the allegations of e-mail between him and a female younger members.

A passionate email is also the focus of Wal-Mart vice president Julie Roehm's negligible departure. Tracing an email for dishonest officials plays an important role in the case of Patricia Dunn fired at Hewlett-Packard.

Email does not just trap high-class characters. Richard Phillips, an IT specialist at Baker & McKenzie (London), sent an email asking the secretary to pay a £ 4 dry cleaning bill after she dumped tomato sauce on his pants. The secretary sent this e-mail to colleagues, and Phillips was immediately called by the slang name ' Fool '.

For most people, common sense and good morality help us avoid trouble. However, many problems with email, and even the most 'sensitive' high-class characters, who are always 'alert' in the training courses may be tripped by negligence or negligence. Here are some basic rules that can help you avoid this situation.

The first thing is to know what the investigators want to find. The latest software not only searches for 'hot' words and phrases such as 'insider trading' or ' Break the law tomorrow, at 3:47 '. Cataphora, the company that helps lawyers exploit data in millions of email analyzes, uses a more difficult-to-detect phrase search software: deliberately ambiguous language ('what we should say ') and combining words to express anxiety (' sleepless', 'confused and bewildered', 'regret'). Clear evidence from a business fraud investigation in the software industry: ' Can we talk about the other day when we talked about it? When will I meet you? Fold it . '

Companies not only test the language, but also change in the habit of writing emails. An enterprise conducted an investigation when an accountant often wrote an e-mail about 9am to 5pm suddenly answered the mail at midnight.

Even a simple subject line can be disastrous - especially if you don't change every time you switch topics. For example, you leave Company X on the headline of the January email. And like many people, you just leave that title line even though the story is no longer about Company X. And then Company X had a problem in April. All emails about your Company X, including unrelated ones with that title, were taken into consideration.

' You never know when your company and yourself will be sued ,' said Cataphora CEO Elizabeth Charnock. ' You have to do everything you can to avoid being followed by email .'

In a white-collar criminal case, the investigators wrote a letter of business and discussed slavery with a title. In fact, the slave has nothing to do with the incident, but since it is mentioned in suspicious emails, the email becomes more public than the sender thinks.

K.Linh