Here we will discuss the problem of sending an email to someone who should not receive it. One respondent told the following sad tale:
Years ago we had such an incompetent manager in training that we collectively wrote a long report of all his severe flaws to get him removed from his position. I was the main writer and other staff helped. The document was intended for the HR director. I ended up sending a copy of the document to the manager we were trying to get rid of because I was distracted and emailing while talking on the phone at the same time… If anyone had ever told me they had done this I would have thought were the stupidest person on the planet!
Here are a few situations in which one might stumble over this Land Mine:
- Not checking the “send to” list and mistakenly sending to a person or persons who should not receive the message.
- This theme has many variations, but the common factor is that many who receive your email will feel that you should not have sent it to so many people, because (a) it is of no interest/import and wastes people’s time and patience, (b) it’s inappropriate for the group/list addressed or (c) the contents were sensitive, personal, embarrassing, etc. and should not have been revealed to a wide audience.
- Sending to someone with a similar name that gets automatically filled in.
- I have a friend named Jeff and a lawyer named Jeff. One day I quickly wrote a confidential memo to the lawyer and hovered the mouse above his name. Just as the email disappeared from sight, I noticed that auto-fill had put in the name of the wrong Jeff. So I was left writing a cryptic memo to friend Jeff begging him to delete the confidential memo without reading it. I’ll never know whether that happened.
- A correspondent wrote, “In one instance, a lawyer accidentally emailed a highly confidential deal terms document to a WSJ reporter whose name happened to be similar to her client’s.”
- Misspelling a recipient’s name and thereby sending the email to an unrelated third party.
- Someone whose name can be spelled with either one “l” or two “l’s” wrote that several times a month people send emails to a stranger whose name has the alternate spelling. Sometimes this person sends back the emails to the intended recipient – but she’ll never know how many messages she’s missed because writers didn’t take the trouble to spell her name correctly.
- Succumbing to the unconscious urge to self-destruct by sending emails to the object of one’s scorn
- One woman wrote, “A young architect whose firm has been hired by my father before saw an article about my parents’ home in the local newspaper. He thought he was sending a note about the article to a friend saying that my father was a jerk, and he inadvertently typed my dad’s name as a recipient, too. My father forwarded it to the young architect’s boss, and he was later fired for essentially bad mouthing a client right to his face.”
- Hitting reply instead of “forward” when snarkily commenting on someone’s email is a guaranteed disaster.
- Forwarding a long chain of email without reviewing to see if there’s anything sensitive/embarrassing in any of the messages
- Blurring accountability by asking many people to do the same task without requesting specific commitments from anyone.
- One reader wrote, “I would suggest ‘the fallacy of the complete and exhaustive to list’, where people put 10 people in the to-do list requesting information or that a task be done and then none of the 10 are sure who is doing it. Each person assumes another person will do it, so no one takes action.”
- Forwarding long message strings without realizing what has been said earlier in the string or, worse, not realizing there was a confidential attachment that shouldn’t have been forwarded.
- Sometimes the business email message string morphs to a different subject that is appropriate to send to a whole new audience, but the person forwarding the message doesn’t scroll down enough to see how it started.
- Using BCC inappropriately.
- This could also be business email Land Mine in itself. Several ways exist to use and abuse the “blind copy” function.
- Failing to use the BCC function and putting names into the “To” and “Cc” lines of people whose names and/or email addresses should not be made public.
- Responding directly to an email in which you were the person who was blind-copied. No one is supposed to know that you received the email; that’s why the writer Bcc’d you. By responding directly, you blow the writer’s cover, which is never a good idea.
SOLUTIONS
- Fill in the addressees’ names carefully, only after you have finished reading and reviewing the email.
- Disable the “autofill” function in your email program so that you have to manually – consciously – enter each recipient’s name.
- Be extremely leery of hitting “reply to all.”
- If you are sending to a large group, use the BCC function so that all recipients’ email addresses are not made public. But do this carefully. Make sure that every person on the list really belongs there. The recipients should be blind – not the author.
- Erase the rest of the string that isn’t germane to the new discussion. It saves readers’ time and avoids potential embarrassment with peers, employees or even customers.
P.S. Hitting “reply all” is such a ubiquitous problem that it will be addressed as a separate Land Mine.