What's your worst email gaffe?

Federal Immigration Minister Jason Kenney was blunt about his assessment of Alberta Deputy Premier Thomas Lukaszuk in an email that went to Kenney's Alberta caucus colleagues and their staff. (Sean Kilpatrick/Canadian Press)

Federal Immigration Minister Jason Kenney made it to the top of Canada's Twitter trends this morning after what appeared to be an email gaffe known and feared the world around - inadvertently replying to an email with "reply all."

Kenny gave a blunt assessment of Alberta Deputy Premier Thomas Lukascuk in an email reply to Conservative MP Blaine Calkins, calling him "a complete and utter asshole."

In the email, Kenney said that he didn't want to host a caucus lunch or dinner for Lukaszuk when he visits Ottawa on Thursday, according to the Edmonton Journal.

Staff of all 26 Conservative MPs from Alberta also found the email in their inboxes. "The only explanation," wrote the Journal, "seems to be that...[Kenney] accidentally hit "reply all."

Advice on proper email usage, from etiquette to avoiding potentially disastrous mistakes, is a common discussion topic for just about anyone who sits in front of a computer monitor for the bulk of their day.

Stories about exceptional gaffes abound.

In April, the University of California, Los Angeles sent emails telling waitlisted high school applicants that they had been accepted to the school - but instead of sending the email only to those students who had been accepted, they accidentally sent to all 894 applicants on the list.

And in 2009, two co-workers at Cornell University accidentally sent a string of adulterous and entirely not-work-safe missives to their co-workers at the university's Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management.

So common is the email gaffe that Gmail actually includes an "undo send" function, which allows you to delete an erroneous message just after firing off by mistake.

Have you ever sent an email to the wrong person - or sent a note intended for one person to an entire list of people? If it happened in the workplace, were there any serious repercussions? Share your stories - on a voluntary basis - in the comments section below.


(This survey is not scientific. Results are based on readers' responses.)