Hillary Clinton requested book on how to send better email

By Barbara Boland, Barbara Boland

Published December 20, 2015

In 2009, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton requested a book on how to send better emails, her emails show.

Clinton asked her chief of staff Cheryl D. Mills if she could borrow a book written by David Shipley called Send: Why People Email So Badly and How to Do It Better. The book claims to provide "clear rules for constructing effective emails" and be "indispensable for readers navigating the impersonal, and at times overwhelming, world of electronic communication." Send provides "essential strategies to help … manage the ever-increasing number of emails you receive and improve the ones you send," according to the book's blurb.

Hillary Clinton has been embroiled in a scandal involving her use of a private email address and personal server to email banned-adviser Sidney Blumenthal during her tenure at State. According to inspector general Steve A. Linick, she "should never have … transmitted [emails] via an unclassified personal system." In a sample of 40 emails just-released from Clinton's private server "revealed four contained classified IC information that should have been marked and handled at the secret level."