Link: http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0515/p13s ... .html?s=u2In effect, e-mail cannot adequately convey emotion. A recent study by Profs. Justin Kruger of New York University and Nicholas Epley of the University of Chicago focused on how well sarcasm is detected in electronic messages. Their conclusion: Not only do e-mail senders overestimate their ability to communicate feelings, but e-mail recipients also overestimate their ability to correctly decode those feelings.
One reason for this, the business-school professors say, is that people are egocentric. They assume others experience stimuli the same way they do. Also, e-mail lacks body language, tone of voice, and other cues - making it difficult to interpret emotion.
"A typical e-mail has this feature of seeming like face-to-face communication," Professor Epley says. "It's informal and it's rapid, so you assume you're getting the same paralinguistic cues you get from spoken communication."
I really think that this should be required reading for everyone at this forum. Its often very hard to know what emotional signals people are sending. Someone might say something sarcastic, but it comes across as mean.
What should we do? Take a second to make sure that they really are trying to convey the message you think they are. Most likely what they said can be interpreted in any number of ways. Most likely the meanist interpretion is not the one that the other person meant.
but i just cannot do without that tool to convey emotions. 
