Email disasters? You've had them. And you've been sharing your
messaging madness with us, in our
'email that got away' competition, brought to you in
association with
Mimecast, SaaS provider of unified email management.
The four best entries will win a fantastic prize as a reward for
your honesty. We just hope you've learned your lesson... Winners
will be announced soon.
Read on for our favourite email blunders - no (real) names are
revealed, in order to protect the not-so-innocent!
Don't tell the client!
While working for an FM outsourcing company on project for a
firm of tax advisors, I was using a database provided by my
employer and noticed that a field which had been requested some
time earlier had not yet been added by one of the developers at our
FM company. I wrote an email to the developer setting out the
problem and the resulting inefficiency. I used a joint email
account accessible to both my employer and the client company - one
that I was in the habit of using because my FM company colleagues
would be automatically copied in. What I hadn't factored in was
that the FM manager of the client company would also be
able to read it...
No sooner had I pressed the send button than my error became
apparent. The boss of the client firm's FM section phoned the
operations manager of our FM company asking what was going on. My
immediate supervisor then put me on the carpet for disclosing
problems directly to our client... I immediately wrote an apology
to my supervisor asking it to be forwarded to my employers' area
and operational managers explaining my mistake - I had wanted only
to copy in my supervisor and colleagues and had chosen the joint
email account out of habit, resulting in the error. Thankfully, I
have not heard any more about this matter and hope that it is now
closed!
The day I brought down the Internet
In 1999, I was just about to go on holiday. It was Friday
afternoon and I was desperate to leave on time. My last task before
logging off was to put on my Out-of-Office (OO) assistant. I'd
never done this before: we were new to Outlook in our company back
then. Without knowing exactly what I was doing I found the relevant
menus and set up the outgoing message. In this early version of
Outlook there was a tick-box that enabled you to send an OO message
to all the contacts in your address book. Unfortunately I ticked
this box as I turned the OO assistant on. To my horror, I saw my
Sent Items Folder filling up with messages and my inbox filling up
with messages from colleagues' OO systems too. And every time my
computer received their inbound OO message, my computer would
respond to it and so on... Pretty soon my inbox and sent items
folders were filling uncontrollably. My response was simple: I
pulled out the network cable and turned off the computer -(I didn't
understand mail server technology back then) - and rushed out of
the office, pausing only briefly to tell my boss of the impending
doom and asking him to contact the helpdesk to warn them and ask
them to please, make it stop. Not the most relaxing start to my
holiday.
The next morning, after an evening spent in the pub calming my
nerves, imagine my horror, when on entering the newsagent I read on
the front page of nearly every newspaper the headline 'Rogue Email
Brings Down the Internet'. With some trepidation I read the story -
I was probably the only person in the world relieved to hear that
it was in fact the Melissa virus, which had been spreading
uncontrollably over the previous few days, and not my OO assistant,
that had overwhelmed the internet!
Who's got your goat?
As part of some testing on a text messaging product we were
developing at work, I set a rule on Exchange that would poll and
auto route incoming text messages containing a particular keyword
in the SMS message to a specific folder in the product manager's
email inbox. The chosen word, for amusement, was 'goat'. So, I duly
sent a text message from my phone with 'goat' as the first word.
The Exchange rule did its job and routed the message to the correct
folder. We left the rule there for future testing and forgot about
it.
Now, at that time, I was chasing the very cute receptionist for
some 'extra-curricular activity'. Things were progressing nicely
via email (can you see where this goes yet?) and I was getting
close to a result when, after a long weekend of late nights on the
booze, having neglected to shave properly I had come into work with
a goatee beard - saving vital recovery time. So, 'Oooh i love your
goatee!' appeared at the top of a very long ongoing conversation
that was full of rather interesting suggestions and arrangements to
meet up the following week. Well, the Exchange rule still
did its job, checked the incoming message for 'goat', found it
inside 'goatee' and forwarded the whole dodgy conversation to the
product manager. Much ribbing ensued... and still does, years
later!
Refusal often offends (but a refund might
appease)
I used to be an Operations Manager for a distance learning
company. One particular student was starting to annoy me with his
inability to grasp the concept of NO REFUNDS WHEN YOU'VE BEEN ON
THE COURSE OVER FOR A YEAR! Eventually I decided to escalate it to
a different department. I added to the top of the email chain,
"Please can you sort this retard out as he is getting on my
nerves." Unfortunately I sent it back to the student in question as
a reply, rather than forwarding it. The chap got on the phone. He
was, unsurprisingly, not very happy. But on the bright side, at
least after that I gave him his refund!
The first rule of business: delegate (but do
it selectively)
Shortly after Outlook had been rolled out at my workplace I
incorrectly added a distribution list containing all employees to
my 'delegates'. I had thought this would enable people to view my
calendar. However, the next time I sent out a meeting request to
one of my colleagues it also sent out a meeting request to all my
delegates - every employee at work – over 1,500 people.
My phone didn't stop ringing with people querying if they needed
to attend my meeting. In fact, the Facilities department helpfully
rang up to ask me just how many chairs I wanted! Eventually the
error brought down the company email system because of all the
traffic I had caused on the network... It took a very long time to
live that down...
Temporary glitch
I had the unfortunate experience of sending the right email to
the wrong person just a couple of weeks ago. We've recently
employed someone internally to fill the space left by a colleague
who emigrated a few months back. Temporarily, we had a contractor
fill the position, whom I neither like, nor get on with. One day,
while sending an email intended for the internal applicant one
day, I decided to let them know that the contractor expected his
contract to be extended and possibly even to be transferred within
the company to another department, but that he was mistaken and his
contract would be terminated. Unfortunately, I sent it to the
contractor, and my attempts to recall the message didn't succeed.
It took me 10 minutes to talk my way out of the email! Luckily he
is only here temporarily after all!
Typographical error
Some time ago, as Head of Technical sales, I reported to the
Sales Director, someone with whom I'd worked closely on many large
sales, so we were on friendly terms. The business was growing from
its beginning as a start-up and with the expanding workload the
Sales Director had decided to hire a new personal assistant. On her
first day in the office, I sent an email to the Sales Director
commenting on his choice of candidates and received a prompt reply
to the message, as follows:
"Thanks for the email.
As PA to the Sales Director part of my role is to read and redirect
all correspondence, including email, to the appropriate staff
members or department.
With regards to your email titled "but can she type?", I think it
should probably be redirected so that HR can look into it.
Awaiting your response, PA to sales Director"
Certainly put me in my place!
A brief history of MIME
I was working as a permanent technician on a newly installed SAP
R/3 system for an engineering company in Bedfordshire in the 1990s
and was heavily involved in applying patches to the application
late most evenings, as this was the only time we could get
downtime. It was an onerous task at best but we were very wary of
suffering any major disruption in service, so each evening we took
a full offline backup of the application environment and data,
before applying the latest patches just in case anything went
wrong.
This meant we worked late into the evening almost every day.
What made it all the worse was that the weather during that time
was glorious and we were all very keen to get away as quickly as
possible to enjoy what little of the day remained. Around that time
we'd also installed our first Microsoft Exchange server and
although we were all very new to e-mail, it was proving to be an
invaluable tool for communicating all sorts of messages... In my
spare time, (what little of it there was) I'd been reading a book
called "A Brief History Of Time" by Professor Stephen Hawking. I
spotted what I thought was a flaw in the book so I duly sent off an
e-mail to Professor Hawking explaining where I thought he was going
wrong.
A few days later I was particularly keen to get home at the end
of a long hard day at work. We just had the latest SAP patch to
apply before we could finish for the day. We'd brought the system
down as usual but I could see that no backup had been fired off so
I sent a fiery e-mail off to our Basis Operator with a view to
speeding things along a bit. The operator was located just next
door in our machine room but it no longer seemed necessary to walk
around and talk anymore now we had this fabulous new e-mail system.
The e-mail message was something along the lines of, "Come on get
your finger out, I haven't got time to be sitting here all day
waiting for you, get on with it!" You get the idea.
Unfortunately the operator was called Stephen Hawkin and yes you
guessed it - I sent the message to the wrong contact...
Five minutes later an e-mail arrived back from Cambridge
University. It said something along the lines of, "Whilst we are
certain that Professor Hawking would no doubt find the contents of
your e-mail fascinating we regret that on this occasion he is
unable to respond in person." I never did hear back from the
Professor about my hypothesis. They say "no news is good news" but
after waiting for more than twelve years I'm beginning to have my
doubts.
Dodgy geezer
From the early 1990's till the late 1990's, a guy - we'll call
him Geezer - was working as a contract instructor for a number of
high-profile computer companies. One of these companies had a
world-wide email alias that all instructors could sign up to.
Geezer was on the alias and regularly received and responded to
emails from other instructors, especially in the USA, who would ask
questions about technical matters or ideas regarding how to teach a
particular topic.
One such email arrived in his In-box and, on reading it, Geezer
was quite taken aback at the apparent stupidity and lack of
knowledge shown by the sender - a young female instructor, based in
the USA, who'd only taught this course a handful of times. For a
laugh, Geezer replied to the original email and added a UK-based
alias-name (of his closest and most open-minded colleagues in the
UK) as a CC recipient.
He'd intended to tweak the original sender & alias name so
that it wouldn't actually get sent to the original sender or
world-wide alias but, alas, in his haste to send out his "joke" to
his colleagues, he forgot to doctor those addresses as planned.
His response was very crude in its language and, to an American,
would obviously cause great offence (especially the bits about what
would be done to her to help her learn the things she'd asked
about).
Unfortunately for Geezer, she read his response as soon as it
arrived in her In-box. The resultant uproar reached her manager's,
manager's manager and within 40 minutes of sending the email,
Geezer was being smartly ejected from the training centre by two
burly security guards.
Suffice to say, Geezer did no more contracting for that client
again!
The morals of this tale: 1) Always check the email addresses
you're sending to 2) If you're going to be offensive, be so to
people you know can take it and who won't mind receiving such
emails from you 3) Never use email to shock an American with
details of a sexual nature 4) Think before pressing 'Send' 5)
What's funny to you may not be to someone else.
The truth is out there
This is a story about an IT Manager, a Business Analyst and a
Software Development Manager. OK so it sounds like a Englishman,
Irishman & Scotsman joke, but hey, bear with me...
We have two main sites to our business, located just 10 minutes
walk from each other. One site was growing rapidly, so it was
decided by the echelons of power that they needed a new IT Manager
to cover the infrastructure side of things. OK so far.
Now, this new manager wanted to get involved in the software
development side of things as well - thinking that she could be a
conduit between the users and us developers, a bit like a Babel
fish if you like. Converting "user speak" into "geek speak" (not
that over the last 7 years we had had any problems with
translations - hell, we have a business analyst for that). Anyways,
after a few months it became apparent that things were, to coin a
phrase, lost in translation. After a few more months of hair
tearing and badly translated user requirements an email landed that
proved the straw to break our business analyst's back. She just
couldn't take anymore.
Now, our BA isn't one for mincing words when needs be. So she
quickly forwarded the email request to the development manager
asking the poignant question, "Is she f***ing joking?" (only
without the asterisks). Sadly for her, our spam filters only work
on incoming email or email going outside the
business. Internal email doesn't, or should I say rarely, gets
checked for such language.
Upon sending the email, she asked our DM if he'd received it
and, sanguinely, he said, "No." Our BA's face drained of all
colour. The memory of the sound of her jaw hitting the desk still
sends shudders down my spine.
You've probably guessed the rest of the story now... Yes, the
email had gone not to the intended recipient, but to the IT Manager
who was its subject! Ouch. That's got to hurt? Right?
Everyone in the team ducked for cover, tin hats at the ready and
pitchforks at hand. Surely the IT Manager would blow her top and
rain terror upon us? But the sound of the IT Manager's wrath did
not appear. No missiles, bombs or broadsides. Nothing. Nada. Diddly
Squat. Zilch. Just the sound of petrified developers and monitors
murmuring their incandescent hum.
To this day nothing has been mentioned. The IT manager is as
nice as pie to everyone. No digs or snide comments. Only one thing
happened, and it proved something of a bonus (for us) out of this
mêlée. The IT Manager ceased translating the user requests!
Speaking the truth sometimes generates the required results...
Reply all
Years ago, I chaired a committee that had a couple of big-wigs
as members, one of whom (X) had just written a very influential
book on the Internet. Periodically, I would have to send nagging
emails to members to ensure assigned tasks were completed and,
after one such request to someone who was a good friend, I received
back an email from him, telling me humorously that he wouldn't do
his task. Without blinking, I fired off an email to him, explaining
that unless he carried out his task I would lock him in a room with
X who would "bore him to death about the Internet". Very satisfied
with myself, I saw that I had received an almost instantaneous
response. I opened it to read a warning from my friend: "next time
you send something to me, try not to click on 'reply to all'"…
To my horror, I had emailed the entire committee including X.
Sweating profusely, I decided to tough it out and three days passed
with silence from X.
Eventually I received a response saying simply, "Ha ha ha. Very
funny. Well, my wife thought so".
Leading by example?
A long while ago, I worked for an organisation which found
itself appearing on the front pages of national newspapers after a
member of staff sent a spectacularly ill-intentioned email which
caught the national interest. In the wake of the event, I was
charged with putting together a roadshow for all staff to explain
appropriate and inappropriate usage of email. The talk covered both
legal and moral aspects and concluded that, prior to sending
something, one should first consider (a) how your mother might
react to reading it and (b) how you would feel if the email were to
be featured in a newspaper. The Senior Partner took me to one side
after his session to congratulate me on a really useful briefing
session and I returned to my desk, happy that I had done well.
Two days later he phoned me to complain that an email he was
sending kept being bounced back. I offered to look into it for him,
and asked him to forward the email to me. The bounceback, it turned
out, was caused by a bad email address but what caught my eye was
the opening line: "A blind man walks into a lesbian bar…."
Mr Right?
This week I received the following email from someone who
appears to work at CBS (truly):
"Not sure if I have the right person - but I’m looking for a
Mxxx Sxxxxxt of Ypsilanti, who competes in the World Rock Paper
Scissors Championships, for a feature story. If this is the right
Mxxx, I’d like some contact info so I can talk with you sometime in
the next week or so about your training. If not, sorry for the
intrusion. Scott R."
I am still considering my response.
Honesty is the best policy
I was at work and someone copied me into an email to my boss
after I had FUBAR'd a database. Keen to minimise any damage, I
immediately went up and explained about the database problems to my
boss, although I did notice she had a somewhat quizzical look on
her face throughout my confession.It wasn't until I got back to my
desk that I realised the sender of the email had deliberately
spelled my boss' name wrong in the email, so it would bounce. I'd
just gone and admitted all my failings to my boss, when I could
have got away with it. I'm sure there is a moral here, just not
sure what it is!
And fnally, here's one with a happy
ending...
My Dad, who was a semi-pro musician in their 60's, retired to
central Spain five years ago. To keep in touch, he has, for the
first time in his life, been learning his way around a computer. I
was visiting once and as usual, his PC was 'playing up' - a result
of him clicking and downloading everything in sight. He'd already
managed to flood his Hotmail address with spam in the past, so I'd
set up a pretty draconian spam filter. Taking a look in my Dad's
Junk Mail folder, I noticed that amongst all the Viagra ads, there
were also several emails from "Sanctuary Records" that somehow
looked far too official to be spam. He said he'd started getting
them every day about three weeks previously and had just marked
them as spam without reading them. I checked the emails out. It
turned out Sanctuary Records - a UK label - were looking to release
a CD of my Dad's old band from the 60's and had sent the urgent
emails requesting my Dad's permission! He ended up getting in touch
with Sanctuary, and with his permission,
the CD release went
ahead – he even ended up writing a liner notes for it!
Update: More entries...
Spellbound
About 8 years ago, I worked in IT for my local council and was
about to leave for a new job in Knutsford, Cheshire. Staying late
one night in the office to dash off an 'all users' email invite to
the customary farewell drinks in the local pub, I quickly typed a
vaguely funny message, skipped through the spell check, pressed
send, and went home. Over the next few days, so many people
complimented me on my “funny mail” that I was beginning to think I
was a new comedy genius. It took the Director of Finance to bring
me down to earth with a bump.
Catching me in the corridor he laughed and remarked “Great email
by the way, I don’t like Knutsford that much either”. I walked back
to my desk, mystified, and decided to check my sent messages.
Only to find I had told everyone in the council that I was going to
work in “leafy Kuntsford”...
Some people just don't get IT...
In my last job, over the extended Xmas holiday (when the
premises were closed) I had been logging in remotely to check that
the email server was receiving emails and to make sure the host
server did not get overloaded. Halfway through the holiday
period the email server was not responding and the host server was
building up large numbers of emails. Given no one was working in
the building and the customers and suppliers were all on holiday
too, these emails were 99.9% spam. So I went on the host server via
the web browser and bulk deleted them. As you know these set-ups
are often not particularly easy to use and can only deal with about
20 emails at a time. I was pleased with myself that I had spotted
one or two genuine emails (mainly Xmas messages) amongst them, and
even one very important order from a large customer. These were
saved.
Getting back to work I told the MD what had happened, and how I
had spent an hour or two of each day of my holiday deleting these
spam emails - I estimated about ten thousand of them in all (we had
no spam filter) - in order to keep everything running. I also
pointed out that I had spotted one good order amongst them, and
forwarded it to him. Feeling pleased with myself I was sure the MD
would be happy too - even if he did not know much about technology
and thought it all a waste of company time and money.
My self satisfaction, however, lasted for only about an hour,
until someone came up to me having overheard the MD telling a
member of the sales team "Joe has just gone and lost us ten
thousand emails!" Well, it's nice to know you're appreciated!
IT's no joke...
A few years ago we ran an online joke shop and decided to branch
out into a bricks and mortar business to, selling jokes, costumes
and everything else you would expect from a joke shop. As you can
expect we had to employ some people to help us with the business as
we couldn't do it single handedly. One of our employees was a girl
called Gem. Gem wasn't what you could describe as a model employee.
She tried to avoid work whenever she could and would pretend to be
busy even when she had nothing to do, just so that no one could
assign her any work. And boy, could she talk! Her favourite topic
for discussion was her fellow workers, her neighbours, relatives,
friends; anyone she could paint in a negative light.
One day she was sitting in the office doing some clerical work
when she decided to use the computer to send an email to a friend.
I can only guess that she was bored, or inquisitive; because she
didn't even claim to know how to use a computer. But she managed to
turn it on, log into Windows, open Outlook and tap out an email to
her friend. It was actually a pretty nasty email about her job and
her boss, using derogatory terms and bad language, and wishing all
sorts of bad things on her employer. What she didn't realise was
that Outlook keeps a copy of the email you send in its Sent
folder...
So the next time my wife used her computer she found a copy of
the email in her Sent Items folder and realised exactly what sort
of employee she had on her hands. Needless to say she wasn't very
happy and that was the last day Gem worked for her.
Mimecast
This competition has been sponsored by
Mimecast, SaaS provider of
unified email management. Mimecast provides email security,
continuity and archiving delievered as a Software-as-a-Service,
which integrates seamlessly with in-house email servers. Every day
Mimecast takes care of millions of emails and documents for
thousands of companies around the world.
What’s more since Mimecast stops spam before it reaches
your network, the problem of lost email is a thing of the
past.