There is a wonderfully horrific story on this week’s show about a woman who wrote a very nasty email to her co-worker and mistakenly CC’d CEO and all of her supervisors on her note.
That story was captured by freelancer Sophie Kohn, who also recorded three other great stories of sender regret. The full MP3s are available for download here:
- Karolina was unhappy at work, thought she hit forward but hit reply all (mp3)
- Karen Mitton psychoanalyzed a friend in an email, then accidentally sent it to him (mp3)
- Ashley Bennion wrote a scathing email to a boyfriend and accidentally forwarded it to the wrong person (mp3)
- Nana unknowingly sent an angst-ridden poem to her boss via instant messaging (mp3)
After listening to those, I realized that we’re lucky here at the CBC. We have an email system that lets you yank a regrettable out of the receiver’s inbox if you get second thoughts after hitting send (it only works for CBC addresses, so I’m out of luck if I send an email to anyone outside the Corp).
We want to play your stories of regrettable email on the show next week. Comment below and we’ll mix them into the program.
Re.: Regrettable Email
Two points:
1) The receiver’s email client has to be the ‘correct’, usually web-based, kind. This should have been made crystal-clear in the article. It doesn’t work otherwise.
What if two competing services for self-destructing email exist. Are you supposed to use two different email clients depending on the sender? Yeah, that’d be a good idea.
2) How does this affect corporate email retention policies (and possibly laws) if the CBC allows destruction of email? (What about the backup tapes’ copies?)
I’ll offer one to start you off: Imagine if the police had such policies. They issue a bad ‘racial profiling’ directive then destroy all copies of the email.
Would you be so flippant (“They’re lucky these at the RCMPC…”) in this case? I’ll leave it to you to imagine other scenarios where this would be a bad idea.
I’m not sure why you feel lucky to be able to reach into a tiny few peoples mailbox and yank a message out.
The problem with this “feature” of some closed email systems is that it confuses people about the nature of email. Some people think it is a form of delayed communication where they can change their mind up to the point where someone actually reads the message.
The reality is that this medium is more like talking out loud where the message is “out there” as soon as you hit send. Further, unlike a private conversation between two people where the person you blurted a comment at may forget, it is like an “out loud” conversation where everyone close by is walking around with their own tape recorders and can re-listen (re-read) what was said as often as they want, and archive it forever.
I have email messages stored in my email system that date back more than a decade.
Every medium has its features, and the best thing any of us can do is educate people as to how a medium works, not confuse them with faulty technical “fixes” that induce people to treat the medium too liberally and make mistakes.
On-air personalities should understand this well. Once you say something on live radio, you can’t take it back! And you should recognize that anyone trying to sell you a technology to allow you to un-broadcast something is selling you snake-oil.
I had an experience at work that taught me a lesson. I am the one in the office who debunks those awful urban myth emails that go through an office like the flu. I had just read the third version of the same one in a day and was replying with a somewhat nasty email to the sender when I noticed that she was actually debunking the myth (I hadn’t read the whole email). I accidentally sent it, but only realized that I had actually done a ‘reply all’.
Luckily, the government email system has a recall function. I tried to recall the message. This apparently generates a message that advises people I have requested to recall an email. I then received an email for each one that went out explaining that it had been successful or unsuccessful in recalling the original message. For my mistake I received over 800 messages. That’s one steep learning curve!
I have a slightly different problem: email recipient remorse. I cringe every time I read an email composed by my boss!
Could you tell me the name of this technology? I hear that it is an application that can be purchased and added to Outlook but would like more details.