Be Free With Your Email

In Rome in the first century AD a philosopher (and former adviser to Nero) writes a series of letters to a young friend; and 20 centuries later what Seneca wrote is still on the shelves at Waterstone's. Lord Hamilton writes mournfully to his wife who by now is rather more interested in Lord Nelson. Ernest Hemingway lets F Scott Fitzgerald in on his dream of owning adjoining town houses, one for his wife and family and the other for nine pretty mistresses.

Winging letters across the county of Somerset, two famous novelists write to each other disparaging much of modern society and socialists in particular. People long ago dead and gone, and yet they continue to fascinate. Ah, the lost art of letter-writing, so often mourned, and not only in ads for Basildon Bond - destabilised, it's complained, by the telephone, and now altogether destroyed by the popular drift into emailing.

Seneca certainly wrote with one eye on posterity, William, Lord Hamilton less so: no doubt Hemingway and Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Powell had the thought at the backs of their minds that some of their letters might one day be printed in books. But who nowadays treasures emails? Superficial, ephemeral, they barely survive their key strokes.

And yet as I set about purging some 3,000 emails that have accumulated on my machine since I started getting and sending them, I'm struck by the number I choose to save. "Are you sure you want to delete this message?" my machine inquires with its customary solicitude, and here and there, no, I'm not.

These communications may lack the wit and polish of Madame de Sevigné but there's a freshness and spontaneity about them which recaptures the moment as more thoughtfully tailored performances cannot. Some, from a correspondent then newly arrived in New York, hectic, unstructured and wildly misspelled, sizzle with wicked observation and wit. Let them stay there a little longer, even if it means that my system works a little more slowly.

The best emails are much like the best kind of conversation; the best kind of conversation is recognised as an art form; and now I begin to suspect that the best kind of email may one day be respected as an art form too. So it isn't at all good news that, as Ian Sample reported in Tuesday's Guardian, researchers at Edinburgh University, analysing the language of emails, are turning up tell-tale signs revealing how neurotic or extrovert their writers are. Neurotics, it was reported, are more likely to indulge in multiple use of exclamation marks or use "..." in their emails. They are also that much more likely to start sentences with the word "well" and to spray their commas and adverbs around more erratically.

There is worse news than this from Scotland. One of the researchers, Jon Oberlander, has developed a kind of spell check which allows you to run your emails though before you dispatch them and suggest expressions that may portray you in a better light.

But "you can't be too careful" is killer advice for emails. It's bad enough to have Microsoft constantly trying to change "which" into "that" or even replacing "realise" with "realize" without so much as a consultation until I learned how to stop it.

Do we really want this spy in the cab cleaning up the intemperances and exuberances that make some people's emails a joy? Will some message from a columnist friend denouncing a famous rival as a shameless opportunist, shyster and charlatan who can't string two words together arrive on my desk as a tepid judgment on his less than limpid prose style and not wholly impeccable judgment?

Yet, given that we have learned from recent experiences how emails fired off in a moment of anger may one day be read out in court by the sort of expensive lawyer who can charge a sentence like "two twos are four" with indefinable menace, I fear that five years from now a high proportion of emails may reach us only after Oberlanderisation.

What we really need is an email tradition comparable with the tradition of letters. Who will be first to publish a book of their email transactions - the Martin Amis-Julian Barnes emails, perhaps, or the Roy Strong-Roy Keane archive? And then maybe we can have an Oxford Book of Emails to go alongside the book of letters in which I found Hamilton and Hemingway (whose letter, written in 1925, reads like an email already).

I commend this notion to adventurous publishers. Who knows: you could have a new Eats, Shoots and Leaves on your hands next Christmas.