The horror stories abound. A careless click on Send, and incalculable damage befalls a sensitive business deal or workplace relationship. Or the sender can become a joke. Or worse.
This is not new; even before email, a careless letter could do much damage if it fell into the wrong hands, or was written in haste. I still keep a mimeographed letter sent by the HR manager of a company to all its employees, where his typist dropped a single letter in the phrase “To: all employees”. Unfortunately for him, this was in Hebrew, and the accidentally misspelled phrase read “To: all slaves” (I kid you not!).
But email is worse than paper mail, much more prone to destructive faux pas. There are a number of reasons:
- Email overload is such that one tends not to put much careful thought into any one message.
- Email is far easier to send to large distribution lists.
- Email can be forwarded very easily to unintended parties.
- The old paper letters had built in delays: they required drafting, typing, proofing, folding, putting in an envelope, stamping, carrying to the mail drop… all allowing the sender to rethink.
So, how can you avoid sending emails you’ll regret? My suggestions:
- Think before you type. That is a generally useful idea, of course… and oft overlooked.
- Re-read after you type. In addition to allowing you to refine what you’re trying to say, this will catch typos and those hilarious spellchecker glitches.
- Never answer an email when you’re angry or agitated about it. Sleep on it first!
- Make it a habit to double-check your addressee list before clicking Send. This is a good time to remove unneeded recipients (reducing their email overload); and it also allows you to detect any wrong addresses, such as ones resulting from mis-typed auto-completed contacts, or a thoughtless Reply-to-All. Take special care with people from other organizations whose addresses may go unnoticed among your own coworkers.
- Lastly, I strongly recommend you set your email program to delay a little before sending out mail, so you can change your mind after hitting Send. In Outlook, you can do this by setting a rule to delay all sent messages (see here). However, this is hard to override if you have an urgent message to push out. To solve this, you can schedule periodic Send/Receive operations (see here); in this way you can still manually hit Send/Receive when you want instant sending (the disadvantage of this method is that a small fraction of messages – those sent just before the scheduled synchronization – will not be delayed).
Murphy is still lurking out there, but by following these tips you may be able to keep his laws at bay.
If you have any more ideas (or horror stories) please share them in the comments!
