Ordinary Gweilo

This is a belated follow-up to my earlier post about emails.

Another thing that idiots do with email is forward messages with all the earlier messages still attached at the bottom. Lotus Notes does have separate buttons for ‘Reply’ and ‘Reply with History’, whereas all that Outlook offers is a global option to do one or other, and I guess most people choose the history option.

The resulting multi-page emails are usually just plain irritating, but if you weren’t copied on the earlier messages it can sometimes be worth glancing through them – you can discover things that you probably weren’t supposed to know.

The worst example I’ve heard about was a message to all the staff in another office of the company where I was working, telling them to attend an important meeting. Anyone who read through the earlier messages (that were still appended) found a list of staff members, and it wasn’t too difficult to figure out that they were going to be made redundant. They were, and someone ended up somewhat embarassed.

I once received an email from the same office that inadvertently revealed some internal discussions about whether to provide some assistance that I had requested. It didn’t exactly show them in a good light, and demonstrated once again that you really do need to be careful what you write down. Never assume that anything you write in an email will remain confidential.

I remember one employee sending an email to a colleague in another country complaining about me (I was his boss). He decided to leave the first three lines of the message blank, reasoning that if the stupid auto-preview feature was switched-on this part of his message might be visible to anyone who walked past the screen and he didn’t want to incriminate himself. However, when he left the company he forgot to delete the messages and so I saw them anyway!!

It is true that you can sometimes discover interesting things by looking at emails on people’s screens, which is one reason why it is best to make the subject heading very general.

Another idiot decided that when he was made redundant he would email all his work to his home email and delete it off the computer, as well as deleting all the mail in his inbox. However, he didn’t delete the mail from his ‘sent’ folder, which rather defeated the purpose. His work was of no value anyway, so it didn’t cause any loss to the company!

I subscribe to a few mailing lists, and one of them in particular is sometimes enlivened by people relying or forwarding messages to colleagues or others but mistakenly sending them to the whole mailing list as well. As Shaky said in his comments that sparked this off, after you’ve made a mistake like that, it’s best to keep quiet and hope no-one notices!