If you have Exchange 2010 and Outlook 2010, you’ll get functionality like this. Do a search for “MailTips” if you’re curious.
Perhaps she was networking. 
Some colleagues at a previous employer were having a, uh, very frank and open conversation about what they thought of the competence and general intelligence of a certain high-level manager. Eventually, the conversation turned to more technical matters, and one of them said “hey, this would be a good question to ask on our company’s internal Java programming mailing list!”
So they forwarded that mail to the list, with the entire previous conversation still attached. One minute later, they sent out a “recall” message, which of course did not achieve anything, other than alerting people who might otherwise have missed it that there was something interesting about that mail.
Even when it is supposed to work (e.g. when the recipient is on the same Exchange server as you) I’ve learned never to trust that “feature”. It usually works if the recipient hasn’t read the message yet, but I’ve had it not work enough times that I usually also send out a message “if you get an e-mail about such and such please ignore it”. Needless to say, Murphy’s Law ensures that if the original message is something embarrassing, recalling it is guaranteed not to work.
If you (any you) haven’t seen it, go here http://www.thewebsiteisdown.com/ and scroll down to the bottom - Edisode 1. Pure comedy gold.
You forgot the bit where they made a note to always contact ZipperJJ directly from now on, because he’s so friendly and will reboot the server when asked.
I’m trying to create my own terrible work at day, just now.
My “Recycle” basket on my work PC seems to be messing something up for me, and I thought about it and could not remember a single time in the several years since they introduced Recycle that I had ever pulled something back out of it. So, I turned it off.
I figured I’d regret it later that day, but so far, nothing bad…
Digital Rights Management aka Information Rights Management aka Rights Management Server. Most corporations have a simple little setting on Microsoft Exchange email so you can send an email that *can not be forwarded. *This is your friend. Put that on any questionable email and voila it’s about 98% bullet proof against blowing up in your face.
At work we would simply dismiss that as a bug in Outlook along these lines, “Hey I just discovered a bug in Outlook. If you set up a rule to forward emails but choose delete instead, it deletes them.” Someone would respond, “How did they not find that in QA testing.”
We find similar bugs in all the software we use - Oracle, Excel, Postgres. All of them take what you enter so bloody literally. Rarely a week goes by without someone saying, “Hey I just discovered another bug in…”
Can’t you just copypaste it? Or, if all else fails, take a screenshot?
IIRC, there are some settings that will prevent these. Now, bear in mind that if all else fails you could still take a photograph of the computer screen. (Though if your admins wanted to get really hardcore they could disable cellphone camera access or confiscate photography devices…really, the question is one of having reasonable security measures in place, and deciding what “reasonable” means to the organization or project.)
Would is also prevent printing of the e-mail?
IIRC, printing is a separate permission.
Intro article: http://www.simple-talk.com/content/print.aspx?article=1023
Maybe there is a software setting that prevents the user from pointing a camera at their monitor?
ActiveSync has a setting that enables admins to disable the camera. I’m not familiar with BlackBerry, but I suspect they have something equivalent.
Some organizations will simply confiscate devices if they have a camera.
[HAL9000]I’m afraid I can’t let you do that, Dave. I am sensing sarcasm and anger in your email. Given the number of recipients you’ve entered, I calculate a 99.14159% chance that this will bite you in the ass.[/HAL9000]