Worst Email Mistakes

The Creative Group published a list of some of the mistakes that managers admitted to making. Note that these are just the ones they admit to – we have a feeling that there are many more that never see the light of day. Nonetheless, in the bullet list of 13 worst email mistakes 10 of them could have been prevented with one of our add-ins:

“Someone sent out confidential salary information to the whole firm.”

Safeguard Send has a keyword filter and warns you when you send out an email with words like “salary information”, or “salary figures”. This feature is normally used for classified or confidential information, but would have worked here as well.

“Someone made a nasty comment about a supervisor and it was sent to the supervisor by mistake. It eventually led to dismissal.”

Although the author didn’t say how this happened, it easily could have been caused by clicking reply to all. If so, this could have been prevented with the Reply To All Monitor which simply puts a prompt like “Are you sure you want to reply to everyone?”

“A person called another employee an idiot in an e-mail to everyone in the company.”

This definitely could have been prevented with the Reply To All Monitor Outlook add-in.

“One of our vendors accidentally e-mailed me information about their sales performance, so I gained some inside knowledge about that vendor.”

Our Safeguard Send add-in could have prevented this – but it would be the vendor that would have needed it.

“We sent an e-mail to a client that was meant for a vendor. It made it difficult when the client had seen our costs.”

Well, we don’t have an add-in to specifically address this scenario. Although that said, we can encourage users to double check emails headed outside the company if they contain an attachment.

“Confidential information about one client was sent to a different client. It was certainly embarrassing.”

Safeguard Send will optionally prompt you when you are sending an email outside the company, or to certain people. In all these cases above, it could have helped by alerting the sender that they were sending the email to a client – giving the sender a chance to think before sending.

“Someone crafted a scathing, sarcastic e-mail about a customer and did not mean to hit ‘send.’ It caused problems.”

Here we have case where an add-in might not be as helpful as simply adding a delay to your Send/Receive time. Doing this causes your emails to sit for a few minutes in your Outbox so if you think of anything else before the email goes out you can catch it and edit it. See How To Use Outlook Rules (the second rule created (at the top) is the one that you want in this case) .

“I once sent an internal memo about restroom etiquette to a prospective client by accident.”

As soon as the words “accident” and “internal memo” show up in the same sentence, our ears perk up because it’s usually a case that our aforementioned Safeguard Send Add-In can help.

“Someone sent me a copy of an employee’s bank records by mistake.”

We would need more information to determine what happened – did the email originate from outside the company? If it was an internal email, admittedly there’s not much we can do to help in this case.

Over and over again, each day many email mistakes are made – let us help you to not make one of them!