Plowing through proposals for and discussions around ETech 2006, and with our focus in this upcoming edition on affordances and attenuation, I’ve been thinking a great deal about email of late. To that end, I’ve kept meaning to point to Merlin Mann’s excellent contribution to the usabilty of email, “Writing sensible email messages”. His missive was brought to mind this morning by a possibly dated but nonetheless useful article, 12 tips for better e-mail etiquette, at Microsoft Office Online (I was surveying the new Office 12 deets at the time). This also put me in mind of O’Reilly’s (and I don’t say “our” since it predates my O’Reilly existence) lovely little book, “Using Email Effectively (What You Need to Know)” by Linda Lamb and Jerry Peek. It’s a decade old, but has aged surprisingly well–and with used editions starting at just $0.72, it’s a steal!