OOPS

Have you ever bitched about a colleague in an email and forwarded it to them by accident? Or written a confidential e-mail but then accidentally hit 'Reply to All' when you only meant to hit 'Reply'?

My favourite e-mail faux pas is the one where a PA sent a message to several important people, changing a meeting dat and apologising for any incontinence that the change in date may have caused....

Sending an email in error can be a minor embarrassment – but we've all seen the kind of e-mail that gets splashed across the Internet and ends up costing someonetheir job. Around two-million emails are sent globally every second, so it’s not really a big surprise that most of us have, at some time, forgotten our netiquette and committed an email faux pas that left us either slightly embarassed or in a spot of bother.

Some REALLY embarrassing email blunders (from officebroker.com)

• A business manager who accidentally sent details of all his employees’ salary on a company group email. Realising his error, he set the fire alarm off to clear the office before going round and deleting the email from every inbox.

• An ad agency which received a request from a client whose company manufactured mobility equipment to: “Produce a brochure about our ‘wa*king aids.”
  

• Following a sick day, an employee who sent an email to a friend explaining his illness was due to ‘class A’s’. Unfortunately, he sent it to everyone in his company including the senior management. He now works elsewhere!
  

• A company which included 24,000 email addresses in the ‘To’ box of a message. Many intended recipients probably never got to the actual message because it took them so long to scroll down to it!
  

• An IT professional who unwittingly managed to ‘out’ a pal to his family. Having received a chatty group email from his mate who had moved to New York, he replied suggesting it would be a great opportunity for him to find himself a new man – only he had hit ‘Reply to All’, thus revealing his friend’s hidden sexuality to his nearest and dearest!

• Whilst having an e-conversation with a friend, a business man referred to a third friend’s wife in a very insulting manner. The e-conversation progressed onto arrangements for a night out which the friend then forwarded on to the third party – forgetting the disparaging comment which he had earlier made about this person’s wife. Not surprisingly, the planned night out didn’t go ahead!
  

• A police officer who sent an email to her colleagues asking: “who stole my yoghurt out of the fridge? Unfortunately she accidentally sent the email to the entire West Midlands police force and received many a reply including…. “Do you need CID? Have you sealed off the area? Has the dog unit been called?”