Doh! I Didn't Actually Just Send That, Did I?

Nick has a funny thing about a woman at PWC who mistakenly sent a reply when she meant to forward, and it's gotten her in a bit of hot water. Needless to say, email is one of the most dangerous inventions on the planet for how easy it is to get yourself in trouble with accidentally.

My favorite all-time email screw-up story, however, was told to my by my sister, who is a Unix wonk at...let's just say a big well-known company, where, among other things, she deals with managing internal email flows. So about four years ago she gets called in by security who's investigating a hum-dinger. She had to piece together what happened backwards, but the long and the short is some guy is recently married and composes a really hot and steamy message for his new wife -- really hot and steamy -- about exactly what he planned to do to her that night when they get home. So her email address is something retarded like mary.d.smith@xyzcompany.com, but he accidentally addresses it to mary,d,smith@xyzcompany.com (note the punctuation).

As most readers will know, commas in email headers indicate separate addresses. What he didn't know, however, was that Big Well-Known Company had a sloppy way of shorthanding internal email lists (before my sister got on the scene and cleaned it up after this mess) whereby they had huge lists of email for everyone in the company according to the letters of their last names. So he accidentally copies this filthy message to the D List -- everyone in the company whose last name begins with the letter "D." We're talking about a Fortune 500 company with thousands of employees.

Turns out one such D person was a female top executive, who thought the note was sent to her with maliciously intent and called security. The guy's first instinct was to pretend nothing happened, and it worked for a bit, as security and the exec first assumed someone spoofed his return address, because nobody could be so stupid as to send such a note from his own computer.

This is not apocryphal. My sister was actually suspected at first (by the dim-witted security detail who couldn't understand any of the technical mumbo-jumbo), as she was one of the few people with access to make such a spoof look convincing. Not sure what ever happened to the guy, but I've taken it as a great object lesson ever since on how careful you need to be with email. That said, I did just reply when I meant to forward, back to a client, no less. Thankfully, nothing as bad as any of these stories.