Lesson learned: Wrong email recipient – delay delivery

It happened to me, the dreaded mistake! Sending an email to the wrong person.

I am sure it has happened to many of us before, as soon as you press Send you see the ‘To recipient’ is not who you wanted and poof! email sent. Most of the time not a big deal, but sometimes this can be the start of a major data breach and the many breach forms that you must fill in!

In the legal industry we use emails day in and day out, and technology tries to help us with the Auto-Complete name suggestion on the To field. But this can be our downfall when we rely on technology too much to get it right, which 9 out of 10 times is great but tech cannot fix human error.

When this happened to me, I did what most people do… panic, try to recall the message and then, when that didn’t work, send an apology message asking the recipient to delete and ignore the email.

In a way I am lucky because this happened to me on an email that was not important and didn’t contain personal information. But I have learned the lesson that I need to be a bit more careful with my early morning emails.

Whilst there are tools which will pop up and ask you “are you sure you have the correct email addresses” every time you send an email, these can be very frustrating and, in my experience, people get so fed-up with the interference they just begin to blindly click “yes” thus they become counter effective.

There are also “AI” tools which will assess if the email has been sent to the correct contact. Again, this can be quite invasive and delay the delivery of emails.

So, what can be done?

Firstly, I have taken the step to semi-protect myself from this happening again by using a delay delivery on all emails! Delay emails

This now gives me a 2-minute window after every email that I send to delete and add the correct recipient in, or even change the content of the email itself. Hopefully this will save me the embarrassment if it happens again – which I hope it does not!

Please note: The “New Outlook” application has a “delay send” built in by default giving you a hover box to cancel each email should you need – perhaps someone high up in Microsoft also sends emails to the wrong person!?

If you would like to learn from my mistake and add a delay in, please follow the steps below. Please note: if you are sending emails from a Practice Management System you may not be able to use this feature, please ask your internal IT team who may be able to help

1. With Outlook open select the Rules dropdown and select Manage Rules & Alerts.

OR

File and select Manage Rules & Alerts, then select New Rule.

2. Select Apply rule on messages I send from the Start from a blank rule area and select Next.

3. The next dialog box will show you extra conditions that you can apply, but where I added this rule to every email, I skipped this by pressing Next. A message box will appear making sure you are happy that this rule will be applied to every email you send. Select Yes

Turning off your Auto-Complete

Auto-complete can be dangerous in that it remembers email addresses that you have used, whether in your Contact Lists or not.

Often people are concerned that switching it off will mean that entering email addresses will take much longer, but there is a simple way to check email addresses against your contact lists.

Type the first few of letters of the recipient’s name and by using the keyboard shortcut Ctrl K (Check Names), if there is only one email address matching the letters you have typed it will add the recipient in the To field. If there is more than one recipient that fits the search criteria, an address book will load so that you can select from the list.