Tips on making sure email doesn't hurt you more than it helps you.

E-mail is a wonderful tool. It’s hard to imagine how we ever got anything done without it. However, e-mail communications—or miscommunications—can get us into trouble all too often. Here are a few tips to avoid causing problems.

• Be careful when you click “reply all,” and to really avoid disaster, make sure your e-mail client is not set to “reply-all” by default.

• Remember that e-mail is easily forwarded: Your correspondence may not be kept private. You may think what you’re sending is just between you and one other person, but it may not stay that way.

• Don’t flame over e-mail; it’ll come back to haunt you. As mentioned above, you never know where it will be forwarded. If someone misunderstands you over an e-mail, the best way to clean up the misunderstanding may be to go offline.