OVER 800,000 Irish people now have access to e-mail and an alarming number of them are ignorant of the correct protocol for corresponding in cyberspace.

A recent newspaper editorial listed many dire legacies of this revolutionary means of communication: plummeting standards in literacy, misunderstandings between friends or colleagues and lack of confidentiality, all of which points up the urgent need for Debretts, the guardians of English manners, to compile a guide to e-mail etiquette.

Until that appears, here’s one I made earlier.

SWEARING

Many smug companies now have fancy hi-tech software that can identify expletives and automatically intercept and destroy incoming mail that contains them.

Sadly, this software is not half as clever as it thinks it is, and has probably proved a source of great annoyance for football managers such as Arsene Wenger of Arsenal and Frank Fuckoff of Scunthorpe United. (Well, you get my drift.)

If you must swear in an e-mail, make sure to use f**king asterisks, or else deliberately misspell the word in question. That’ll show the smarmy cnuts!

CAPITAL LETTERS

At best, sending an e-mail typed exclusively in capital letters is the electronic equivalent of shouting. At worst, it’s the same as writing a good old fashioned letter detailing your recent abduction by aliens in green biro, inserting it in an envelope and then scrawling obscenities all over the envelope because you’re insane.

JOKES

Tommy Cooper would spin in his grave if he could see what’s appearing on PC monitors all over the world today: reams upon reams of lame witticisms incorrectly attributed to him.

Tim Vine, an English comedy circuit stalwart who also peddles a fine line in carefully honed corny one-liners also has reason to feel aggrieved: vast swathes of his material can be found whizzing their way through cyberspace attributed to Tommy Cooper.

Forwarding "amusing" examples of piss-poor US student "humor" to your friends will not earn you their respect. Rewriting it and passing it off as your own work is unforgivable. Everybody knows that it’s illegal to have sex with your grandmother while gutting fish in Fife, Alabama. Let it go.

IRRITATING "FACE" SYMBOLS

|:-( > Fuck off!

THE "REPLY ALL" ICON

Inappropriate clicking of the "Reply All" icon can be nothing short of calamitous. Jobs, spouses, friends and money are just a handful of the things that have been lost by people who carelessly clicked "Reply All" when they meant to hit "Reply".

CLAIRE SWIRE

I don’t know Claire Swire and I’ve never met Claire Swire, but I’d like to.

She lives in London and I live in hope. If I ever do get to shake her hand, I’ll be able to ask her if it’s the same one she held her work colleague’s bollocks in while she blew him to within an inch of his life during a drunken one-night stand earlier this year.

So will the millions of other people around the world who have never met her but – thanks to this unchivalrous swine and his mates – know that she gives good head.

We should all learn from Claire Swire’s mistakes. Do you want to be in a position where you have to change your name by deed poll just to avoid the trauma of seeing people you’re being introduced to start sniggering at the mere mention of your name? Me neither.

SENDING E-MAILS TO PEOPLE YOU DON’T LIKE

Sending e-mails to ex-girlfriends/ boyfriends and other people you despise explaining in detail exactly what it is you don’t like about them might seem like the sensible thing to do when you barrel home pissed at 2am on a Saturday morning, but rest assured, it isn’t. Take it from me, I’ve learnt the hard way.

However, if you can’t help yourself, make sure to delete the mail in question from your "Sent E-Mails" folder before you pass out. With any luck, you’ll forget all about it, they’ll be so insulted they won’t dignify it with a response and you get to remain in blissful ignorance of your folly until you accidentally bump into them at a mutual friend’s party and they pour a pint of lager down the front of your trousers.

Ideally, the best thing to do is to ask a trusted friend to hide your computer’s internet connection wall-jack before you leave the house, and make him or her promise not to tell you where it is until you ring them the following day.