Ever accidentally sent an email to the wrong person? Sticky situation...

In My Humble Opinion
1

At work, I always share e-mails, jokes, etc with the two ladies (Laura and Rae) that are in the next two cubicles. We are all pretty good work buddies and often go to lunch together, etc. We send e-mails back and forth all day long, with saucy comments, etc. Today, Rae came to work with a bad cold with lots of coughing. Well, Laura sent me an email saying “I can’t believe she came to work today, she should have kept her ass at home and not spread her germs”. Laura accidentally sent the email to Rae and now Rae is mad. I’m sure they’ll make up, it seems so petty.

It reminded me of the time that I got a very nasty joke in my work email and my work mate asked me to forward it to her. Well, I used our company global address book and sent it. It wasn’t until a few minutes later that I realized that I’d sent it to someone else with the same last name. Luckily, I was able to stop the email. But, I shudder to think what would have happened if it had gone thru.

Have you ever sent an inappropriate email to the wrong person? And what was the outcome?

2

No. But I’ll relate something that happened at one place I worked circa 1997.

The email system we used, I believe was Lotus cc:mail. At the time, it was not set up to directly send to an Internet address (e.g., jimbob @ isp.com). To send to an outside address, first you had to select “Internet” from the predefined list of valid internal company recipients, then another box would open, and you would enter their email address.

The company recipient list was in alphabetical order, of course.

One person (and, no, not me) attempted to send a nasty photo of a young lady and a liquor bottle–and she wasn’t drinking out of it. However, instead of selecting “Internet,” he selected the entry right above it, “Internal Auditing.”

Hit “send” before he realized his error.

They were not amused.

He exited the company shortly thereafter.

3

was he audited?

we had the same system lo, many years ago. in our case a woman sent out an email to everyone stating: “i’m flattered”. we were rather baffled, not grossed out.

4

I haven’t sent one, but four or five times a year I get an e-mail from a guy in our company talking about how he “went out and picked up this hot slut last night”, and how he’s “fucking this bitch and fucking that bitch” and so on.

Don’t know the guy…never met the guy. He’s in a branch office hundreds of miles away. Turns out he went to college with a guy with the same name as me, and every now and then he’ll forget that his college buddy is a college buddy, not a coworker, and he’ll use our corporate mailbox to send me the e-mail meant for the other guy.

It’d be fine, but he keeps. On. Doing it. How many times can you make the same fricking mistake before you catch on? It’s gotten to the point where I just respond with a “Nope…I still didn’t go to college with you”. I generally get back a “Please disregard” response. Ummm, yeah…it’s been very disregarded.

5

Oh, Lord, I am the queen of this gaffe.

Most recently, my best friend, Zippy, offered to throw a party for me. YAY! When she told me all the groovy stuff she had planned for the shindig, though, I started worrying about how much it was all going to cost her, and so determined to keep the guest list at a minimum.

Well.

Next thing I know, Zippy has e-mailed two of my other good friends, Flapper and Weasel (come on, aren’t these better names than the usual “Sally” and “Mary” pseudonyms? ;)), both of whom live out of town, invited them to the party, AND offered up MY house as a place for them to stay while they’re in town for it – all without consulting me. I found out about it at the precise moment that Flapper and Weasel did, because Zippy copied me on the e-mail to them.

So I e-mailed Zippy, politely but firmly stating that although it was too late to do anything about it, frankly, I’d rather not have Flappy and Weasel at the party OR camping out at my house for an entire weekend. I also pointed out that, given the choice, there were people IN town that I’d rather invite to the party, people who’d been left off the guest list so that I could keep the guest list at a minimum.

AAAAAAAAAAAND guess who else I accidentally copied on that e-mail? Yep. Flappy and Weasel.

Long story short, I cried, I apologized, Zippy cried, Zippy apologized, and Flappy and Weasel forgave me.

But I haven’t really talked much to either of them since.

6

I got an email once from a lady asking what I thought of her poster design for some library in another state.

I told her I thought it was pretty good, but that I wasn’t the person she was looking for, so my vote probably wasn’t going to count.

7

I forwarded my husband a stupid work memo from my boss. My husband replied to my boss, not me, with an extremely mocking e-mail. My boss thought it was from me. :eek: I had to tap dance like crazy to get out of that one. Luckily I had made no comments when I orginally forwarded the memo to my husband.

8

A couple nights ago I got a text message from a very attractive female friend. She is friends with both me and my gf. Anyway, the text message made no sense to me, and included a topless pic (at the beach). I kept looking at the pic, thinking that she was wearing a flesh colored bikini top (the pic was pretty small).

Anyway, as I’m studying the pic, I got a second text message, explaining how I was the wrong person for the text message to go to. Ooops.

9

I was working on a very small project as part of an existing Web site. For some reason, I was continually getting the client’s name wrong. First I kept misspelling it (which made it hard to log in to places) and then for some reason I decided that his first initial needed to be part of everything. So instead of sending email to smith@bigdomain.com I kept emailing jsmith@bigdomain.com

Worse yet, I kept missing the fact that I was doing this, so when I “double checked” to see that I had sent it to smith and not jsmith, I was completely missing the j.

Anyway, mr. jsmith@bigdomain.com emailed me back and was like “this isn’t for me…but I have done some Web design and I can see that there’s this problem with this page doing this blah blah blah…” The stuff he pointed out was not in relation to the thing I was working on.

I wrote him back and apologized, thanked him for telling me about my error and said thanks for pointing out that stuff but I know this site is total shit and the guy thinks he can make sites but he can’t and he won’t pony up for a “real” site and he’s only paying me to do this one little part etc…

A few weeks later, the real guy called me and told me that I had typed his email wrongly on the site. It’s SMITH not JSMITH … “My cousin, jsmith@bigdomain.com, keeps getting email from my site!” he said.

Took me a minute but I realized I had previously bad-mouthed him to his cousin. Oops!

10

The employees hated the office manager. The office manager sent out an email. I replied with a mocking email, but accidentally hit “REPLY ALL.”

Luckily, the office manager was out to lunch. I tip toed into her office, pulled up the email, and did a quick delete on her inbox.

11

There was nothing terrible in the email, but I once replied to an email from my boyfriend, telling him how my day was going, love you etc. etc.

Of course, the email address he sent it from was not his personal email address. It was from the address that management shared - so my email got sent to EVERY SINGLE MANAGER IN HIS WHOLE COMPANY. Including, like, the CEO and stuff. Thankfully it wasn’t that big or formal of a company, but we both got ribbed for a while, and I got some interesting replies.

12

I did this one… I had been dating a girl and then we broke up. Problem was, we kept hanging out a lot and it was pretty obvious the attraction was still there (the reasons for the break-up were more logistical than anything else). I send an e-mail explaining all of this to my best friend… or so I thought. I actually sent it to the girl instead. When she replied I think I turned a very, very deep shade of red, but it actually got us to talking about our relationship and we ended up dating for three very happy months. We’re still friends to this day.

So sometimes, a mistake like that pays off.

13

Yikes. This is my worst nightmare. Though I’ve done worse- I was on a friend’s laptop and tried to print out a dirty e-mail (not from a lover or anything, just a boy who writes dirty because it amuses him. The first line had something to do with his cock). When it didn’t come out of her printer, I checked print monitor and… it came out at her work. It was the weekend, but come Monday, it wasn’t there. Never did find out who found the thing…

14

A couple of times. The first time was at college and it was on an email system where “reply” didn’t mean “reply to sender” it meant “reply to everyone EXCEPT the sender”. That was a steep and embarrassing learning curve. Had to apologize to one guy in person, and in the other case hope that I never met any of those people in real life.

In my modern working life I’ve done it twice; in both cases it was nothing horrible, just a joke getting sent to the wrong person or list. I recalled the email, sent an apology to a few folks (“Sorry, I accidentally typed in the wrong name, it won’t happen again”) and that was the end of it.

15

I used to work at another company with a current coworker of mine (we worked at another company, now we both work at my current company). One of the less-respected members of upper management at the last company was leaving and my coworker sent a mocking email to a friend of his. Or at least he thought so.

He didn’t look too closely and instead sent it to someone else with the same first name - the CEO. He immediately saw what he’d done and was freaking out when he got an email from the CEO’s admin that said “I don’t think you meant this to go to him. Luckily, he’s out of town right now. You owe me.”

He replied with “YES, I DO!” Later that week, she received a bouquet of flowers at the office.

16

I received a series of emails from a guy at a previous company I worked for. I very nicely replied and advised that he seemed to have the wrong person. he apologized but did the same thing about a week later. I again told him he had the wrong person, and he emailed back saying he was sorry, must have typed it wrong blah blah and then asked how my day was.

Turns out it wasn’t really a mistaken address, he had a crush, wanted to ask me out but didn’t know how to start talking to me.

17

My husband has a cousin with the exact same name. This cousin hosts the family 4th of July party that I resent with a passion. Every year I think my husband is forwarding the e-vite from his cousin to me and every year I say, “Oh, no! Do we have to go to this damn thing?”

Luckily the cousin is a classy guy and never mentions the insult.

I just thank whoever one thanks in these cases that I only commented on my son’s closed eyes in the last batch of pictures cousin sent because what was really comment worthy was cousin’s wife’s hair and not in a good way.

18

Several years ago, a friend of mine and I were subscribed to the same work-related listserve. (You already know how this one is going to end, right?) She and I had been corresponding off list about some difficulties she was having with her boss. Some topic came up on the list that she replied to with an anecdote that I knew was about her boss…so I composed a reply and hit “send” without noticing that the “reply to” address was the list, not her.

Thank og there was nothing too awful in my reply. I was mostly worried about the potential ramifications for my friend. Our list had, many years before, established the Cele Garrett Award for just this kind of gaffe, so I immediately nominated myself.

19

Back when my wife and I were dating I sent an email addressed just to her first name, forgetting that she used a different provider than me. Nothing explicit, but a few "I had a great time last weekend"s and "I love you"s.

I got back a very confused response from a woman apologizing for not remembering me.

20

We had a contract to produce a publication for a client, which involved several rounds of submissions and approvals, waiting for new content, rinsing and repeating. The project was plagued by delays, but that’s not all that unusual with this organization.

We’re good at helping keep things on track, i.e., sending out reminders of project timelines and whatnot. We got a reply to one of our follow up notes. Boy, did we get a reply. It took us a moment to realize that the project manager meant to send it to his subordinate only, but accidentally hit reply all.

Here’s the note, pasted in its short, sweet entirety:

Can I just repeat the juicy bit again? Let us see how we can blame them for the delay and get our fingers out of the contract. This was not some run of the mill bureaucrat, but relatively high upper management.

A few minutes later (before any response), he sent the following email directly to us:

So, not only did he know that we just read of his trying to figure out a way to blame us, he goes ahead and tries to do so. Huuuuuugggeeeee Colbert-sized balls!

The outcome? We had extensive documentation of our timely submissions and copies of the many follow up emails we’d sent regarding approaching and passing deadlines. This went into a letter to his boss (senior upper management), who promptly had him authorize payment, apologize, and write an unequivocal retraction that was a veritable letter of recommendation.

We shudder to think what would have happened had he not hit reply all.