Try this: when writing an email in a possibly inflammatory situation, save it as a draft for an hour and review it before hitting “send”.

What’s a possibly inflammatory situation?

• You are going to write something with which the recipient will probably disagree.
• You’re expressing a strongly felt opinion, even if asked for it.
• You’re writing to someone two or more steps up any organisational hierarchy.
• It’s late and you’re tired.
• It’s late and you’re drunk.
• You’ve just switched contexts from something that used your brain in totally different ways — coding, WoW, etc.

I’m sure there are more, but those are some that have happened to me, many of them in the last week. In some cases I managed to wait an hour, and in others not. I should probably work on that.

Some people say you should leave things overnight before sending them, but I reckon an hour’s enough to get most of the benefit. You can calm down or get a bit more context before sending it, or even just have the opportunity to re-check the spelling and grammar and make sure you’re expressing yourself as well as you can. (And keep in mind that a flame with a typo in it is almost guaranteed to generate a spelling flame in response, taking the discussion down a rather pointless side line.)

After an hour, if it’s a public mailing list, there’s a good chance someone else will have made the same reply you were going to make yourself. If you were going to say something that made you look like an asshole, you’ve just saved yourself.

If you’ve just switched in from some less verbal activity (coding being a good example), or one in which you were acting aggressively in perfectly legitimate ways (gaming), an hour might give you time to regain some of your social faculties.

And finally, you may well do what I seem to do half the time: forget all about it. If you don’t remember to send your email after an hour, it can’t have been all that important after all.

(And yes, I’m back, I hope. This website, along with various others that I maintain, took a long hiatus in the wake of an international move. I’m sure going AWOL is a horrible breach of blog etiquette, in which case I can only apologise and attempt to get back on track.)