Gaffes in communication are common in all media, and email is no exception. It does, however, enable special opportunities to be very sorry for what you said…

The problem with Forward

The main reason is that an email, once sent, is no longer yours

. You must assume – and to your detriment often forget to assume – that it will get forwarded and re-forwarded. Everything you said to your intended recipient will likely as not be placed before numerous other people. It is astounding how thoughtlessly a recipient can set loose a message meant for their eyes only!

The problem is worst when the message has more than one component; say, if it has an action item followed by criticism of someone who failed to do it. The recipient will delegate the action by forwarding the message, but will neglect to erase the criticism. And then Murphy’s Law will step in and get it in front of the person you blasted. Arrghh!

Another common scenario is that the embarrassing part lingers in the thread at the bottom of an evolving conversation, so the forwarder doesn’t even realize it’s down there – but a perceptive forwardee may well see it and take offense.

What can you do about this?

What can you do? Precious little, it seems. Even writing explicitly “Delete this part before forwarding” may backfire, because the recipient will forward this admonition as well. After all, nobody reads emails attentively or to the end – they read the first line, figure what it’s about, and shoot it on to someone else. I’ve seen this happen often.

The safest solution is to simply avoid email as a channel for anything you wouldn’t want to see on the front page of the New York Times. If it’s the least bit sensitive, use the phone. Or at least assume – believe with all your heart – that the message will assume a life of its own and run around the organization whether you wish it or not.

Is there a technology solution?

Since human behavior is prone to fail in this respect, the solution could come from the technology. I can think of a number of directions worth considering:

• Implement self-destructing paragraphs. That is, enable the sender to specify that a paragraph – or the entire message – be non-forwardable, and erase itself when to message is sent forth. This would require either a change to the email protocol (don’t hold your breath, though this is definitely overdue), or an add-on to the email clients within an organization. The concept is hardly fantastic, there are solutions out there that make it impossible to forward stuff – for instance The NoReplyAll Outlook Add-In, from Microsoft Research, adds two buttons to the Outlook ribbon that allow the sender to prevent recipients from Forwarding or Replying to All when they receive the message being composed.
• Implement a gaffe-detecting tool. In its simplest form, this function was part of the Email Effectiveness Coach I’d developed long ago at Intel; the tool would scan each message being sent and alert the user if it was addressed at once to internal and external recipients. The potential for gaffes there was clear – in fact this feature was put in at the request of our users. A more advanced tool could scan the content of the message and alert the sender to potentially confidential phrases; the semantic analysis capability involved certainly exists.

Pay attention, solution developers!