If it sometimes feels like you are a professional e-mail writer, you are not alone. People are increasingly going to the office and spending a big chunk of their day reading, writing and responding to electronic missives. On average, business users spend 19 per cent of every work day using e-mail, the latest statistics show. If you work an eight-hour day, in other words, you'll be spending more than 1? hours of it on e-mail. Or just under 100 minutes. Given that many people work much longer days in Hong Kong, you could easily be spending more than two hours as an office e-mailer. E-mail has transformed working life, in many ways positively. But it has also had negative effects. The most obvious detriment is spam. Flyers for cheap drugs, vitally important missives from lawyers in Nigeria with their hands on missing millions, and digital billboards promising easy ways to increase the size of your personal - errrm - endowment are the digital trash littering up the electronic world. But it seems we are learning to handle spam, or at least learning to live with it. According to The Radicati Group, only about 18 per cent of the messages that e-mail users receive are trash. Although overall spam use is rising, it seems that spam filters and anti-spam tactics are keeping up pretty well. According to Radicati, which tracks mobile communications and e-mail, people sent a total of 196 billion messages per day last year. That is expected to grow to 374 billion messages per day by 2011. The researchers note that people have become increasingly keen to get their e-mails on the run, with wireless e-mail expected to grow from a US$6 billion market in 2007 to almost US$25 billion by 2011. They expect the 25 million wireless e-mail accounts to grow to 395 million accounts in just four years. Another recent study from Britain suggests people shouldn't be so keen on being accessible all the time. The study suggested that modern workers were increasingly suffering from 'e-mail stress.' That's a byproduct of their struggle to cope with the deluge of electronic information they're receiving every day. A computer scientist from Glasgow University, Karen Renaud, working with two academics from Paisley University - psychologist Judith Ramsay and statistician Mario Hair - surveyed 177 people to see how they felt about e-mail at work. More than one third of the respondents - 34 per cent - said they felt 'stressed' by the volume of e-mail they received and the obligation to reply to it quickly. Another 28 per cent reported that they felt 'driven' by e-mail and found that it heaped pressure on them. Only 38 per cent of the respondents were classified as 'relaxed' about e-mail because they did not reply instantly and would wait a day or even up to a week before responding. It's easy to understand how the pressure mounts. E-mail is intrusive, with visual and sound prompts telling you it has arrived. Many people in the survey, most of whom were academics or working in creative fields, ended up wasting a lot of time checking for e-mail, with some respondents clicking on their e-mail application 30 to 40 times per hour, for a few seconds to minutes at a time. 'Females, in particular, tended to feel more pressure to respond than males,' the researchers suggested. 'Many individuals seem to feel pressured by e-mail, and feel this pressure negatively as stress.' The problem was particularly disruptive for people in creative or project-focused fields, such as academics, writers, reporters and architects, where e-mail often distracted the workers from their core jobs. But for people who use e-mail as an integral part of their work, such as workers in call centres, the problems were less pronounced. The shift in the way the world works requires a different set of skills. If 80 per cent of life is showing up, like Woody Allen said, then the stats suggest the remaining 20 per cent is waiting in your inbox. Personal interaction is important, in other words, but it's also vital to present yourself properly in the electronic world. Kingsley Smith, a Hong Kong-based business training consultant who runs Management Development Asia-Pacific, said he was amazed by some of the poorly spelled and written e-mails he received, full of misspellings and grammatical errors. 'I think like a lot of relatively new tools, we haven't really come to terms with how to use it and what is the best use of it,' Mr Smith said of e-mail. He said standards had slipped the worst in electronic communications, whether it was online or on the phone. 'I think standards in meetings are very, very high in Hong Kong, though there is still the odd person who insists on taking a phone call even when you've turned your mobile off. I think it is more the non face-to-face communications, phone messages and e-mails that are a problem.' Ann Marie Sabath, the founder of At Ease Inc. and the author of books such as Business Etiquette In Brief and One Minute Manners: Quick Solutions to the Most Awkward Situations You'll Ever Face at Work, extended the list a little more. She suggested that e-mail correspondents added warmth to their electronic missives by using a form of thanks in the first 12 words of the message. 'Use the person's name in the first 12 words of your message and always use 'You' before 'We' before 'I,'' Sabath said. Like most business coaches, she stressed the importance of checking your messages for spelling and grammar, and she suggested proofing the message by printing it or reading it aloud. You could also consider printing messages you received that were important for future use or may be needed for reference. Sabath also pointed out the importance of professionalism in business e-mails. Tailor the message for the receiver, and address the person on a last-name basis if you haven't met face-to-face or the person has a higher-ranking title. Don't be over familiar if the situation doesn't warrant it. 'Just because an e-mail message is more immediate than other forms of communication does not mean the tone should be more casual in nature. Your e-mail message should carry the same degree of professionalism as a document that is printed on your organisation's letterhead,' she said. Top-10 e-mail errors Not checking your e-mail with the same regularity as your voice-mail messages Not labelling the subject of your message to reflect content Not responding to e-mail messages in the same prompt manner as other forms of communication Not proofing an electronic message with the same attention that you give to a document in hard-copy form Being verbose rather than succinct Sending out unsolicited mass-mailings that could be considered spam Labelling a message as 'urgent' so that the receiver will give it priority unnecessarily Not listing a phone number and fax in your message Trying to be humorous in your message when it could be misinterpreted as sarcasm Sending copies of e-mails to people in address groups rather than being more selective about who receives the message