Email etiquette checker?

Sometimes, in the heat of getting a lot of things done, I don't read emails I send as closely as I should. Is there an automated way to pop up warnings before a potentially-unpolite email is sent? I'm thinking about something that would say "wait, why don't you have a 'please' or 'would you' in that message?"

I'm using Thunderbird 2 on Ubuntu 9.04. I may be willing to switch email clients if another program offers this. (Using a Mac is also an option, which I'd prefer. Not sure if Mail.app has more options, though.)

Thanks for your help!

Benjamin Oakes

Posted 2010-03-29T15:16:00.937

Reputation: 2 585

3"Caution: this message to boss@myfirm.com contains swearing. Do you really want to send it?". Yes, I guess it could be useful. – Gnoupi – 2010-03-29T15:18:42.150

Haven't run into that one yet (thankfully), but that's the gist of it. :) – Benjamin Oakes – 2010-03-29T15:21:15.590

Eudora had a similar thing: http://imgur.com/Hh4b3.png

– user1686 – 2010-03-29T16:02:32.977

@grawity: That looks like exactly what I want. Have you only seen it in Eudora? – Benjamin Oakes – 2010-03-29T17:05:14.573

Answers

Possibly slightly off topic but I've developed a habit of entering some random nonsense into the BCC field of any emails that I compose to external customers or to management.

This way I can't accidentally (or sleepily) click on the Send button and only realise afterwards that I haven't read it properly; until I manually remove the "erkgjherjghrejh" from the BCC field then the email won't get sent.

Richard Lucas

Posted 2010-03-29T15:16:00.937

Reputation: 2 744

Interesting approach... I might adopt it for important emails that I dont' want to accidentally send. – Benjamin Oakes – 2010-04-01T14:34:15.957

This isn't a direct answer to your question, but Gmail Labs has an Undo Send option that delays a message for a moment, so that if you hit send then realize you shouldn't have said that, you can stop the message before it goes out. For more information, Google for "Gmail Undo Send".

A similar feature for Thunderbird might help if one exists.

What you really want is to run a filter on outgoing messages. For example, you could move messages with certain words to a Suspicious Outgoing Messages folder.
For Thunderbird 2.0 there is an extension for filtering outgoing messages.

The extension documentation says 3.0 will have that built in, but a quick Web search offered no evidence of that.

Paul

Posted 2010-03-29T15:16:00.937

Reputation: 287

The Check and Send extension lets you specify a list of words. It will then warn you before sending if any are present.

When installed, go to the extension's preferences and look under the "Words" tab. Punch in a list of your preferred swear-words here.

A nice feature is that it can skip over quoted text when searching, so if your boss was swearing at you in a previous message, it doesn't warn you for the rest of the conversation (unless you swear back).

It's also possible for it to warn if text is not present; you could use this with "please".

Mechanical snail

Posted 2010-03-29T15:16:00.937

Reputation: 6 625

Interesting, that might fit the bill. Thanks! – Benjamin Oakes – 2012-07-31T02:27:02.907

-1

If you use outlook, macros will help in checking the subject/body of messages

bala

Posted 2010-03-29T15:16:00.937

Reputation:

3thankfully i don't think Outlook is available for Ubuntu. – quack quixote – 2010-03-30T07:38:37.153

Oops my fault - dint read the question properly :( – None – 2010-03-30T09:32:24.277

it could be used with Wine, in theory, so it's not entirely offtopic... – quack quixote – 2010-03-31T01:40:39.970