Recent controversy surrounding the publicity of kiss and tell stories on social networking sites has meant that we're all worrying about how much technology is out of control. However, the real issue is that, for some, technology is not out of our control, but it is beyond our control. And as a well known journalist and television presenter face a prison sentence after using a social networking site to name and shame, it seems that even those in the know are not completely cyber-savvy.

However, there are some basic rules you can follow to ensure you are adhering to good practice when using online communications, including emailing - and keeping technology within your control.

The following top five tips will go some way to ensuring you don't cross the invisible boundary between public and private realms:

1. Security: Emails are private documents, and you should ensure that anything confidential is sent with the utmost security.

2. Storage: Ensure that you file any email correspondence securely and can easily access original mail, replies, and read receipts if needed.

3. Accessibility: It's crucial that you can access and respond to your emails from anywhere if you want to prove you are serious about your business.

4. Reliability: Obviously you need a reliable network provider, but you also need to be able to trust your software program.

5. Integration: Organisations need to be able to integrate emails to other business processes, in order to save time and money.

Outlook 2010 promises to address each of the five points above, and also includes new features never before seen in a Microsoft email application. Already delivering premium business and personal email management tools to more than 500 million Microsoft Office users worldwide, Outlook 2010 can handle vast amounts of email with ease.

You can condense, categorise, or even ignore entire conversations with a few clicks. This is thanks to the new conversation management tools and the improved Conversation View. To access Conversation View, go to the View tab in the Conversations group and select Show as Conversations.

It's even easy to ensure that you send the right information to the right people with MailTips. MailTips instantly alert you to potential distribution issues and Quick Steps take the multi-stepped tasks you perform most down to just a single click. You need to have access to Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 for MailTips and have to be enabled by Exchange administrator.

Now, Outlook 2010 automatically groups related email replies into conversations. Conversations are identified in your In box by a grey arrow/chevron box. Above, you can see a collapsed conversation on the left and an expanded conversation, exposing the related reply messages, on the right.

Conversation View saves In box screen space while still keeping email intuitively organised. And for anyone who has experienced the frustration of not being able to get on with other tasks as ping after ping after ping of new email arrives into the In box, Outlook 2010 offers an Ignore Conversation option. By selecting Ignore Conversation, all subsequent responses to an email string, for example, remain hidden within the conversation view and don't generate new mail alerts from Outlook.

The Conversation View brings together all emails related to the current email which makes it easier to see the full conversation when responding to emails. This Conversation view is enabled by default on all your Outlook folders but if you want to turn it off, then simply go to the relevant folder. Right click on any of the field names and click Arrange By/Conversations/Show Messages in Conversations so that the Show Messages in Conversations is no longer ticked. This will remove the conversation view from the chosen folder.

If you want to apply this new setting to one or more (or all) other folders, then select the View tab on the Ribbon. Now click Change View and then click Apply Current View to other Mail Folders. The Apply View screen will be displayed. Select either specific folders or select your entire mailbox. You will probably also want to tick the option to Apply view to subfolders. A little more conversation, and a little more action - guaranteed.