'Fancy a ride?' may seem a harmless enough enquiry when spoken to an office colleague waiting for a taxi. But when sent in a seemingly innocent email, without intonation or facial expression, it can all too easily lead to career suicide. NICK GALVIN considers the dark, dangerous side of emailing.

WHEN Claire Swire emailed boyfriend Bradley Chait to tell him how much she had enjoyed a recent encounter she, understandably, intended her sexually explicit message to be for his eyes only.

Flattered, Bradley forwarded Claire's erotic musings to a couple of friends who in turn felt they deserved a wider audience and forwarded the message on to a few of their friends...

From there the internet's awesome power took over and the message flashed around the world, ending up in some 10 million inboxes within days.

Claire, 29, was tracked down by gleeful tabloid reporters and forced to go into hiding, while Bradley and his pals received a severe reprimand from the major London law firm for which they worked.

Claire also was reprimanded by her PR firm employer, but one imagines that would have been nothing compared with the awful, toe-curling embarrassment of the whole unsavoury incident.

Helped along by the actions of an exceedingly ungallant boyfriend, she had fallen victim to one of the most powerful and destructive tools in the modern office email.

Admittedly (unless you happen to be one of the two people intimately involved in the whole affair), this tale is pretty amusing but another more high-profile email victim was certainly not laughing when forced out of her job by careless use of email.

Former political adviser Jo Moore must surely rue the day she hit the "send" button on an email message to two of her senior colleagues in the Department of Transport.

The now infamous message was sent at 14.56pm on September 11, 2001 just half an hour after the second plane exploded into New York's World Trade Centre.

"It's now a very good day to get out anything we want to bury," ran a line in the email.

Unfortunately for Ms Moore, one of her colleagues thought the message would make interesting reading for the press.

It wasn't long before Ms Moore and her boss, former Transport Secretary Stephen Byers, parted company and she was looking for a new job.

These two cautionary tales neatly illustrate how careless workers often are when sending emails.

The casual and instantaneous nature of electronic communication leads them to drop their guard, putting into an email information and opinion they would never dream of committing to paper in, say, a letter.

Put this tendency together with the fact emails are both very difficult to destroy and very easy to trace and the potential for catastrophe that lurks behind the "send" button is quite plain.

According to a recent survey, email messages regularly end up in the wrong inbox through simple carelessness.

This month, a survey of 500 office workers by a recruitment firm found almost half of those questioned had accidentally sent an email to the wrong person.

Among the red-faced emailers, one hapless job applicant sent an email revealing how untruthful his CV was to the human resources boss of the company he was hoping to work for.

If these email bloopers only concerned workers accidentally broadcasting details of their personal lives or unintentionally sinking their employment chances then they would be merely amusing.

However, the matter becomes deadly serious when it is confidential business information that is sent in error to a customer or, even worse, a competitor.

Stuart Penny, managing director of Swindon-based IT support company Miracle Services, says all businesses need to treat email seriously. This means setting up a system to manage all messages sent and received by the company.

"You need to take the view that anything coming in or going out has a legal implication for the company," he says.

"You need to make everyone in the organisation aware of the issues. All workers should know that by sending an email there may be a legal liability."

Beyond ensuring employees take email seriously, it is also important to have a system for archiving email. That way, should a contract or other dispute arise, the company will be able to defend itself.

"Email needs to be backed up and those back-ups need to go off site," says Mr Penny.

Back-up methods depend on the size of the business.

Writing messages to CD regularly may be sufficient for a small company, while bigger concerns should consider industrial strength solutions, such as optical disk technology.

"I even know of one company where every email that comes in or out is archived on paper," says Mr Penny.

And while preserving email is vital for good record-keeping, on the other hand it's important to be aware simply pressing the "delete" button will not erase an email you want to get rid of.

Modern forensic techniques can even recover data from hard disks that appear to have been wiped clean.

This fact has been highlighted in recent high-profile corporate fraud cases such as those involving Enron and Arthur Andersen. And in May merchant bank Merrill Lynch handed over $US100m in fines after investigators recovered internal emails describing as "junk" the same stock the bankers they were recommending to clients.

Ouch!

The message in all of this is to think twice before committing to email any information you wouldn't happily share with everybody else in the company.

And if you are going to send something sensitive via email - take great care to send it to the right person!