Electronic mail, or "e-mail" as it is known, is the digital equivalent of a note. Although lacking the intimacy of face-to-face or even telephone conversation, it offers the ability to efficiently and effectively communicate on many matters across town or around the globe. Internet e-mail is efficient for several reasons: its transmission is free; it can be sent to one person or a thousand individuals or organizations on an established mail list with a single command; and as with any note, it does not require the simultaneous presence of the participants. The note itself may contain attachments such as this report, including graphics, or any other document in digital form, permitting among other uses, joint editing of draft documents by multiple parties thousands of miles apart.
Communication via electronic mail (“email”) has become commonplace in all over the world and the use of email for international communication grows each day. Email offers several advantages over other methods of communication, including the ease and convenience of preparation and speed of transmission, all at relatively inexpensive cost. Email, however, carries with it security risks, including inadvertent misaddressing, interception and malicious dissemination as exemplified by recent email remailing computer viruses.
Given email’s practical advantages, businessmen and professionals such as lawyers who deal in privileged information have embraced email as an often used means for communicating even sensitive, confidential and legally privileged material. The nature of email allows for even a casual responsive message to carry along with it detailed, confidential matter and communications. Email users tend be use email informally, at times much as if it were a face-to-face, private conversation. Some users express thoughts and opinions using phraseology they may not necessarily have used had they given careful thought to their words and the various interpretations which others might place upon them.
An email may also contain a whole series of electronic messages between or among two or more parties, such as when the parties have been “replying” to the other’s messages rather than creating a “new message.” Disclosure of an email risks disclosure of an entire dialogue between senders.
In addition to the security risk of interception over the Internet or of virus-driven malicious dissemination, one false keystroke could send an email intended for one recipient to an improper recipient or even an entire class of improper recipients. Such a risk could spring from inadvertently hitting “send” after selecting the wrong address or email group from a stored address book of possible recipients.
Given the foregoing risks, a writer of email should be cognizant that his or her communication might be read by unintended persons. Some advocate the use of encrypted email whenever privileged or trade secret information is to be communicated. Yet, there are practical issues associated with encryption (which are beyond the scope of this article) and in actual practice most attorney-client and business email is sent unencrypted.
