OT: Sending mistake emails at work.

[PennStateNate]

I work in a decent size office (law) a few years ago a secretary who was engaged to one of the corporate lawyers and going through a tough patch started bickering and were hitting reply all on a company email.

One of the internal investigators who worked closely with me sent a investigative email with report to someone by mistake instead of management.

Any good email stories??

 

[Ski]

I work in a decent size office (law) a few years ago a secretary who was engaged to one of the corporate lawyers and going through a tough patch started bickering and were hitting reply all on a company email.

One of the internal investigators who worked closely with me sent a investigative email with report to someone by mistake instead of management.

Any good email stories??

Had one high ranking person hit reply all on an E-mail where he dogged one of the recipients and he forgot to take the recipients name off the E-mail before hitting send. Fortunately for the sender, it was late on a Friday afternoon. My boss, the head of the IT department decided to bail him out, so we reset the recipient's password, logged in to his E-mail account, and deleted the E-mail. The recipient came in Monday morning and locked his account trying to log in with his old password. "Gee, we don't know what happened, but we will reset your account and your password for you............"

 

[colt21]

Had one high ranking person hit reply all on an E-mail where he dogged one of the recipients and he forgot to take the recipients name off the E-mail before hitting send. Fortunately for the sender, it was late on a Friday afternoon. My boss, the head of the IT department decided to bail him out, so we reset the recipient's password, logged in to his E-mail account, and deleted the E-mail. The recipient came in Monday morning and locked his account trying to log in with his old password. "Gee, we don't know what happened, but we will reset your account and your password for you............"

well that was nice of you!

We had a staff person in our finance office send an email out to all of the Senior Leaders (but he thought he only sent it to one) in which he indicated that one of the other Senior Leaders was a PITA.

She then asked "What is a PITA?"
Yes he had to profusely apologize !

 

[The Spin Meister]

Received an email from a friend in Vancouver that was sent to everyone in her email contact list. She quickly send another saying delete the first. First said she got a new job title, SVP of Public Relations.....except she left out the 'l' in public. Meaning she SVP of Pubic Relations!

 

[Langmuir]

Not really a funny story but I learned a lesson several years back about sending emails where I am complaining about other employees. I was asked to review a paper written by people in our Singapore office. As I was reviewing it, the data looked very familiar. I talked to people in my office and found that about half of the paper was completely done by a coworker of mine. This was several months of work. They even used the exact graphs that my coworker made. No mention of this coworker or even an acknowledgement in the paper.

Since I was the senior engineer in my group and the guy that did most of the work was a younger engineer, I thought it was my responsibility to raise a stink. I sent an email to a couple of VP's and my boss. I was pretty irate. I know it was probably not illegal since we are all the same company, but I thought is was completely unethical to essentially publish a coworkers material without even an acknowledgement. I was pretty harsh in my email.

So what does my boss do? She forwards my email to the people in Singapore who wrote the paper. The VP's said they would like into it and handle it, but my boss did nothing but forward the email.

In the end my coworker got listed as an author but it took a long time for me to patch up my relationships with our Singapore office.

The lesson I learned was never complain about coworkers via email. Do it verbally.

 

[Cletus11]

i work for a company that 150,000 employees worldwide. a couple of times per year they send out an all employee email (and only recently did they start to bcc so people cannot reply all to the entire company as they used to just cc so if you hit reply all versus reply it goes out to all 150,000 employees). So about 7 years ago when Israel sunk that boat in Palestine, some employee from the Middle East took that all employee email address and sent out an anti-Isreal rant on purpose to the entire company. So then for the next 48 hours you had all kinds of people replying back to him via reply all with pro-Israel emails. It got so bad even though corporate told people not to respond that they ended up figuring out how to suspend any email that had those keywords in it.

 

[Cletus11]

Best email story is HR sends out a spreadsheet with all the employees that report to me when I decide on their yearly salary increase and any bonus money. So she by accident didn't send me my tab in the spreadsheet only to fill out, she sent me the entire spreadsheet with all the departments tabs such that I had the salary and recommended bonus of every employee in our business unit right on up through the president.

 

[Delco Lion]

About 10 years ago I sent an email to a client by mistake that included a very graphic and detailed account of my previous night with a woman that was 20+ years younger than me. As recall, one of the words I used was "rockstar"... My client is the same age as me and we've known each other for many years. It wasnt overly damaging, just embarrassing as hell.

 

[CVLion]

I work in IT consulting. I used to attend a series of meetings with our client where the reps from another vendor would take minutes and distribute them via email.

One time we received the minutes, followed almost immediately by a “The Sender would like to recall the message” (a feature in Microsoft Outlook) and then a re-send of the minutes. Since we were receiving our copies of the minutes on our own Exchange server, the “recall” feature didn’t actually delete the original copy.

We were naturally curious as to what kind of screw up had necessitated the recall, so we perused the first email. Apparently the sender had intially attached her raw notes from the meeting rather than the carefully-edited final version. Raw indeed! It contained her personal editorial comments throughout, including no fewer than eight points at which she had typed out “Don is an a**hole,” sans the asterisks. Don was her boss.

Very fortunately for her, the copies going to the client and her own colleagues were all being routed within the original Exhange server, and were apparently deleted without being seen. Thus she stuck around... but left before too much longer. Ironically, it was Don who ended up being fired a few months later. Guess she had him pegged right after all.

 

[Lion84]

I get mostly ones in error where everyone gets the same one that has nothing to do with them but they feel the need to hit reply all to these e-mail asking not to get them or why did I get it in the first place and this goes on and on. Not that hard to just hit reply to the sender and not reply all - the joke someone always includes at some point is "every time you hot reply all a kitten dies".

 

[fastlax16]

About 5 years ago we were doing a final contract review with Pepsi. At the same time we were about to start a trial with Starbucks. Our starbucks contact had a very similar name to one of our lawyers. On the email forwarding the final Pepsi revisions to our legal team (about 7 lawyers) outlook auto-inserted the Starbucks email. The head of our legal team noticed it really quickly, I thought I was fired. I pay more attention to who gets copied now.

 

[RGWhirly]

An email went out about some sort of notice to all about something related to an IT matter (don't remember the specifics). Well one bright person decide to reply to all something like how the heck do I opt out about getting all of this crap. What makes it funny is that the guy was in IT.

 

[Obliviax]

I've had a few embarrassing emails (Hitting all instead of directly back). The best one was I worked for a small software company that got acquired by a huge multi-national. About six months in, they hired a well-healed exec from a competitor. We had a national meeting and the guy didn't show up. I hooked up to Wifi and got an email from him, to the entire company, stating that the company was unethical and lied to him during his interview process. That he had had a heart attack due to stress and he was resigning and suing the company. He urged all employees to do the same. I sent the email off to the printer and got a hard copy. Within minutes, the email was deleted off the server.

I previously posted that I sued a former employer and spent two years defending four years of emails I sent. Fortunately, I always return a meaningful email with a "thank you' and send a copy to my hard drive. I was able to defend them all, well, because I had context. But I learned the legal issues around emails and am shocked at how email is abused on a daily basis. The legal liability is real. One of the emails was an email from my boss to a coworker for a review. The coworkers cover letter was relatively nice but the attached review called me very name in the book. This was two weeks before trial. I had my lawyer hired a forensic expert in emails and asked for access to the server. I challenged if this was REALLY the attachment of if they created another word document and named it the same so it looked like it was the attachment. The company refused and said they'd challenge my access to their email server in court. They folded a few days before trial and we settled. To this day, I believe they tried to substitute a fake document and that is why they were going to fight access to the DB that they were referencing.

 

[Lionguy32]

This one goes back over 20 years ago, but I'll never forget it. There was a scam fundraising email going around trying to raise money for a sick little girl name Jessica Mydeck. Say that one fast a couple of times, and it will take on a different meaning.

Someone thought he was doing the charitable thing and forwarded this email to the entire company. This was a rather large company, so the email went to about 12,000 people. The next hour was pure comedy as people kept replying all to say it was a hoax, and even more people would reply to all saying don't reply to all.

 

[Uh Clem]

Our small (under 50 employees) health services company had been in negotiations with the son of a billionaire philanthropist who had made his money in cable television. No, it was not the Robert's family. Junior had pursued us, so we began talking to them about either bringing them on as investors, or selling the company.

Junior drafted an email that outlined his plan to divide our management team, replace most of the key executives, and introduce last minute demands that would have diluted the sale price. He then sent it out to his team as well as ours. The dope didn't realize what he had done until the next meeting when he was accused of negotiating in bad faith, and then had the email presented to him after lying to our faces about his intentions.

Once the negotiations fell apart, Junior tried to put together his own company and entered our niche. He even hired some of our lowest performing employees away, but only managed to keep the doors open for about 18 months, before he pulled the plug on it.

 

[JWB389]

We had some health insurance glitch (IMO - user error) where an excel spreadsheet was sorted wrong leading to misaligned rows. Our HR manager sent out a blast e-mail asking everybody to stop by her office and update their social security number. Some dude replied all with his SS number. We got a lot of mileage on that one. Somebody replied (leaving off some of the more stuffy people) asking him for his bank account info.

 

[NittPicker]

Call Frank Fina or any of the other porndogs. They'll tell email stories for hours.

At one time I had a coworker who was in the boss's doghouse. The boss was a jackass and the coworker wasn't the most competent guy in the world which resulted in contempt running both ways. One time the boss sent the coworker a condescending email about something he did wrong. The coworker then tried forwarding the email to a friend outside the organization with a comment to the effect of "See what I told you?? My boss really is a fu**ing jackass." The problem was instead of clicking forward he clicked reply and sent it back to the boss (who was out of the office at the time) including the comment meant for the friend. Realizing his mistake, he was unable to recall the email and panicked. Then he contacted the boss's secretary and asked if she could log him into the boss's email so he could delete what he sent. The secretary didn't want to be involved and said no. Can't blame her for that. So the coworker had no choice but to wait for the boss to return and admit what he did before the email was opened. The boss read the email and reamed out the coworker but good. It was great joke fodder for everyone else.

 

[The Spin Meister]

Lesson in all of this is never put anything in an email that you wouldn't want read by your co-workers, boss, clients, and/or spouse. 'Cause ya just never know where it will be forwarded to by friends or enemies.

 

[PSU_Chicago]

../... never put anything in an email that you wouldn't want read by your co-workers, boss, clients, and/or spouse .....

Some Dangers of e mail
e mail address auto fill
all the trailing e mails below yours
Replying to all

Write every e mail like it is going to be filed with the court

 

[Obliviax]

Some Dangers of e mail
e mail address auto fill
all the trailing e mails below yours
Replying to all

Write every e mail like it is going to be filed with the court

agree. I did, once, send internal contract redlines to the opposing attorney along with some editorial comments that where I felt they didn't understand or were being unreasonable in how things worked. Since it had the disclaimer, stating that it is for its intended audience, he called me and told me what I had done. he then deleted it. it never came up and I have no reason to believe he read or acted on it (shared it with their clients). Much props to him for his professionalism.

 

[Cletus11]

I get mostly ones in error where everyone gets the same one that has nothing to do with them but they feel the need to hit reply all to these e-mail asking not to get them or why did I get it in the first place and this goes on and on. Not that hard to just hit reply to the sender and not reply all - the joke someone always includes at some point is "every time you hot reply all a kitten dies".

So I always wanted to write an email back to those who hit "reply all" to these mistake emails asking to be taken off the list and say something along the lines that this was a corporate test to see who was smart enough to hit 'reply' instead of 'reply all" and anybody that hit 'reply all' is going to get fired.

 

[Ski]

Not an E-mail issue, but another (I think) interesting incident I have come across in my career. Working in IT I was looking through our departments' work stations and laptops to see if any of them had Windows shares set up on them. I come across a laptop that had the CD drive set up as a Windows share. I click on the share and the first name on the list of files is "anal_beads.jpg". I click on it and it is what you would expect it to be inserted in the expected body location.

Now, our machines had somewhat cryptic names that included part of the device's serial number in it, so the owner of it was not immediately obvious. I chuckle and show my boss, the same head of IT as in my E-mail story. We do some digging and it turns out that the laptop was used by a coworker in the office. My coworker would take his laptop home from work at night and it turns out he would use it to view his porn.

So, my coworker had forgotten to remove his porn CD before bringing his laptop back to work that morning. He had shared out his CD drive in the first place to make it accessible to use it for doing remote installs across the network (this was 20 years ago BTW).

Anyway, at the time we discovered his shared CD, he had his laptop plugged into the network across the campus. When he got back to the office, my boss confronts him about it, and the dummy tries to lie to him about it! So, my boss hits the eject button on the CD drive and out pops the porn.

At that point I was asked to leave the office, so I don't know how the conversation progressed past that point. The guy didn't get fired, but about a month later he accepted a position in the UK.

 

[PSU95alum]

I was working at a company many years ago doing data analytics. I supported a sales team of about 5 Sales Managers, all of which I had great relationships with outside of the office. That month I was especially busy, and this one client kept pestering my friend for some reports, and in return, my friend kept pestering me. Of course, it was my job to get the reports done, but I was buried in work. My friend, the Sales Manager for this client said, "just send me an email telling me when you can get it done". So I sent him a very short yet professional email explaining the situation and the report would be ready next week. At the very end, I hit enter twice and in 72 font bold red letters I wrote "NOW F_CKING BLOW ME, A-HOLE!!!" There was no editing however. It was all written out, plain as day and very visible. About 30 seconds later my buddy looks over and says "Thanks. I forwarded it over to Bob (the client) so he knows when to expect the reports". I chuckled at him and said, "Yah, right". He didn't think twice of my reply and turned away. I sat there petrified and walked up to him and said "you didn't really send that email did you?!?" "Yah", he said, "why?"

My eyes were as big as golf balls. I had him pull up the email, and unfortunately, he didn't actually open the email but simply read it in the VIEW PANEL side window. In that situation, the email looked complete AND professional. I told him to scroll down. With one simple and short roll of the mouse wheel, those big 72 font red letters were screaming right back at him!

I looked at his face and he turned as red as the letters and panicked for about 20 seconds, and then busted out laughing and said, "WE'RE F_CKED!" We immediately went into a private conference room and called the client to explain the situation. He was very understanding, and laughed about it and said he understood. Needless to say, the client got his reports within the hour.

 

[lionsnphils]

I got two good one: I was formally a curriculum supervisor in our school district. I am now a principal.

I was e-mailing one of our teachers and I received a reply " I crawled in naked and you ignored me" I eventually replied with ????? and she said that was to go to her husband.

One time one of our teachers was upset with me and was e-mailing her husband, our tech guy, complaining about me. Well, she was e-mailing me thinking she was e-mailing her husband.

 

[MJG-90]

I get mostly ones in error where everyone gets the same one that has nothing to do with them but they feel the need to hit reply all to these e-mail asking not to get them or why did I get it in the first place and this goes on and on. Not that hard to just hit reply to the sender and not reply all - the joke someone always includes at some point is "every time you hot reply all a kitten dies".

We must work for the same company. Although I imagine every company has this problem.

 

[yeahtoasty]

Received an email from a friend in Vancouver that was sent to everyone in her email contact list. She quickly send another saying delete the first. First said she got a new job title, SVP of Public Relations.....except she left out the 'l' in public. Meaning she SVP of Pubic Relations!

For several months, our township's mailed newsletter proudly announced that the Department of Pubic Works met every fourth Tuesday. It's great to live in a community that cares enough to have a committee devoted to ensuring that our junk is working properly.

 

[CF LION]

Slightly different twist on this topic.......About 10 years I was working with a recruiter to land a new job. We texted each other as a means of communication to set up calls, etc. One Saturday morning I got a text from him that simply said "I'd love to suck your toes tonight". I texted him back "Good morning Ed. All I really want from you is to find me a new job".

 

[rem524]

Lesson in all of this is never put anything in an email that you wouldn't want read by your co-workers, boss, clients, and/or spouse. 'Cause ya just never know where it will be forwarded to by friends or enemies.

Very good advice!
I'd add that this isn't just about emails being accidentally forwarded. It isn't hard at all for your company to archive copies of every email that is sent through the corporate servers. You should assume they can search and read every email you send.

 

[Beachwineguy]

Not my company, but I remember a law firm changing the subject line of an email, trying to pass it off that the person asking the question was a different coach that the actual one asking the question. Anyone with half a brain could see right through it, but, of course, the mainstream media took it and ran with it.

 

[lionsnphils]

About 20 years when e-mail started to become the norm, I did a prank on one of our “loose canon” administrators. I sent her an email and in the subject line I list listed everyone’s name the way it looks in the CC line knowing she wouldn’t figure it out. About 2 minutes later she came down snorting mad thinking i sent the email to the whole building. She didn’t find it as funny as we did.

 

[psute]

Retired law enforcement, as many of you know. Made cases because of emails. Email is documentation. In many cases, Email is your friend, BCC'ing to a private email account can cover your ass. I, personally, will not use email for any personnel issue, to bitch about someone, or any kind of sensitive information, etc. All Emails with attachments that I open are first forwarded to a private account. Yeah. I'm paranoid. I have a reason to be. Text is the same way. It does not go away. Ever. It is stored somewhere and retrievable. Never say anything in Email or text that you do not want to be brought up in a court of law for any reason. Your words, you own 'em, even taken out of context, because the context can be changed long after you've forgotten the conversation. The only thing private is the spoken word, in person, with no witnesses or recordings.

Continue on, I am enjoying the stories......

 

[Norm Petersin]

Years ago, we had a 3rd shift supervisor that was being canned. The termination agreement was meant to be sent to Steve, the GM. The HR Mgr sent it to Steve, the 3rd shift supervisor in error. He packed up his belongings and left before anyone came in on first, lol.

 

[Beachwineguy]

In all seriousness, not an email, but just a poor choice of timing by a company I had dealings with. I used to be a restaurant manager, and we got weekly deliveries at 5 am on Saturdays. Obviously, this was not our normal hours to work, so our team had to show up quite early just to receive this delivery and it normally took a couple hours to unload. One Saturday, the truck doesn’t show up. We wait and wait, and still no sign of it. Finally, around 11:30 at the start of our lunch rush, it shows up.

Apparently, this shipping company grew too big too fast. They were going to have to lay off most of the staff working in the warehouse responsible for loading the trucks. Friday night when the workers came in, they told them that they were all getting laid off. They looked at each other and declared that last night was their last night working and that they all quit. This left no one but upper management to load the trucks, resulting in the six plus hour delay in our delivery.

 

[PSU_Chicago]

Retired law enforcement, as many of you know. Made cases because of emails. Email is documentation. In many cases, Email is your friend,

I archive practically every e mail I receive or send. In the event of a dispute with a client or co worker ... that history and support is invaluable.