WITH the number of pink slips becoming more common, so has the farewell e-mail.

And it has become somewhat an art form with no boundaries of how it should feel or look like.

Take Mr Jason Shugars, who worked at Google. His farewell e-mail's subject line to 5,000 co-workers was 'So long, suckers! I'm out!'.

While that may not have been the most eloquent, he worked at a place whose off-centre corporate culture is more forgiving than that of your average buttoned-down investment bank.

In the rest of his goodbye, Mr Shugars, a senior sales compliance specialist, reminisced about workplace moments that included putting cake down his pants at a sales conference and singing 'Hit Me Baby One More Time' in a miniskirt and braids.

Mr Shugars, 34, told Los Angeles Times: 'It took me a long time to write it. I didn't want to send out a stale 'good working with you, please reach me here' e-mail. Who wants that?'

Like so many aspects of the Internet era - how to unfriend on Facebook, how much to reveal on a personal blog - the technology has gotten ahead of the etiquette.

There are, quite simply, no rules.

Some farewell e-mails, like Mr Shugars', strike a light-hearted, even funny tone.

Some are workman-like and short.

Others are poetic or poignant, expressing surprise or regret at the turn of events.

And a few use the electronic goodbye to blast the boss.

In May, lawyer Ms Shinyung Oh was let go from the San Francisco branch of the Paul Hastings law firm six days after losing a baby.

The seven-year associate, who said she was told her previous glowing evaluations may have been 'overinflated', composed a blistering e-mail to the partners and fired it off to about 1,000 colleagues globally.

'If this response seems particularly emotional,' she wrote to the partners, 'perhaps an associate's emotional vulnerability after a recent miscarriage is a factor you should consider the next time you fire or lay someone off.

'It shows startlingly poor judgment and management skills - and cowardice - on your parts.'

Within an hour, it was posted on a widely- read legal affairs blog, before making its way into the mainstream media. Ms Oh claims she has no regrets on speaking out.

Mr Will Schwalbe, co-author of 'Send: Why People E-mail So Badly and How to Do it Better', said the farewell e-mail was a reflection of two intersecting trends: the universality of e-mail and the confessional spirit of the times.

Don't say too much

In the pre-computer world, Mr Schwalbe said: 'Personnel wrote something - a memo, Xeroxed; generally, you didn't get to do it. They did it. But what had been an HR function is now a personal function.'

That, he said, leads to a different sort of message.

Outplacement professionals, naturally, are against the parting shot because they fear for a person's ability to land a new job.

'It's so easy to e-mail, and that's the risk, isn't it?' said Mr John Challenger of the outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc. 'Once you've put it out there, you can't get it back.'

Vent to your mom or boyfriend, said Ms Alison Doyle, a job search expert on About.com. 'You can have all these feelings but you shouldn't necessarily share them. And don't go on about how terrible this is.'

She added: 'Err on the side of too little information rather than too much.'

This article was first published in The New Paper.