Three little dots. That’s all that they are, just three little dots. However, I can’t figure them out. To give a little background on this conundrum, I received an email today and the sender kept using these dots in-between their sentences. For example:

“I’ll pick up that later…it shouldn’t be a problem. Let’s meet tomorrow to discuss it…3:00 works for me”.

Now traditionally, these dots can be used to indicate that more is to come, cliff-hanger style. For example, the conclusion of a mystery novel “And the killer is…..”. They are also used as a common convention in software such as Microsoft Office to indicate that further action is required. One example of this is the classic “Open…” option. The problem is that I don’t think the above sentence fits into either of these categories.

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People are always looking for better ways to deal with the massive amounts of email that circulate through our inboxes everyday. It can definitely feel sometimes that you are overwhelmed with email, and that you’re actually spending more time with your email than doing actual work. In the article below, Sharon Sarmiento discusses seven tips that she thinks will help to tame the savage beast that is your inbox. I don’t agree with them all, however read the article and judge for yourself. You can find my comments immediately following the article in the My Comments section.

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Although you’ve probably heard it a hundred times before, after reading an article in MSNBC today about email snooping I think it bears repeating: Be careful of what you send over your work email.

In this article from MSNBC on email snooping, according to a recent study one in three big companies in the United States employ people to read outgoing email from their other employees. I guess this shouldn’t come as a surprise, however believing something is happening and knowing it is are two completely different things.

Why would they do this? Well, the article goes on to state that 20% of all outgoing emails contain some kind of risk to the company. This is a pretty large percentage when you consider how many emails are sent from these companies a day.

The lesson here is to be very careful when sending emails at work. With the increasing use of networks and the internet in the workplace today, I don’t see the number of companies snooping on your email decreasing anytime soon.