E-mail could be hazardous to your career.

My former boss had me check her email. She was very unorganized and never on track, and even thought I resented doing so, it was the only way I could keep track of what I needed to do. However, I never checked her personal emails, just strictly business emails.

One day, I saw an email from another person in the company, with the subject title of something I was working on, so I opened it, thinking I’d find something imperative to the project. Imagine my surprise when I saw the sender’s message said, “You’re on vacation, why are you checking your email?” to my boss. She had replied, “Tiffany is never on top of things and I have to fix things constantly.”

I started looking for another job that night, and it took me a couple of months to find a new job. I was so frustrated with always covering for her and fixing her mistakes that while I was job-searching, I started bcc’ing her bosses on my replies to her emails telling her when she messed something up, and eventually they figured out she was not as nearly good at her job as they thought. Karma. Watch what you write if someone else has access to your email.

My older mother’s super-prim and proper friend, “Ann”, fowarded a fishing joke (her husband is retired and an avid fisherman) which she had recieved and that had an attachment. But the lady didn’t review the attachment if she even knew it was there (being one of the typical AOL challenged email users,).

Of course the attachment was a picture of a well endowed topless woman holding a couple of fish!!! Best part was that while she had forwarded it to some other friends, Ann had also forwarded it to her parish priest!!!! My mother had to call her and explain what had happened. She then called me laughing like crazy, describing the scream Ann had made when she finally was able to view the picture….

I had just left a company, and called back two days latter to talk to a co-worker and was told he was no longer working there.

Turns out he was selling drugs via E-mail. Can’t believe he was that dense to be selling drugs via E-mail.

This tool helps with at least some of the reply to all problems: http://www.SperrySoftware.com/Outlook/Reply-To-All-Monitor.asp.

At a major car manufacturer I had worked at, the HR department was in the habit of sending out promotion announcements on a fairly regular basis. On one afternoon, an announcement went out regarding the promotion of a particular manager to the role of Department manager.

Several minutes later, the entire company recieved a reply to the announcement, from one of the manager’s new direct-reports, apparently intended for another person within that department.

The gist of it was as follows:

“Oh great, now we’re working for Bob Smith. I hear he’s a complete pr*ck, but the worst part is that he has breath that could peel paint right off of the wall”

The funniest part was watching literally dozens of people pop up out of their cubes with looks of disbelief, like prairie dogs!

Needless to say, the guy was gone within a day.

At a major newspaper, there was a person whom everyone thought was sweetness and light itself. This person had nearly 20 years at the paper. An e-mail was sent off site telling the “truth” about the people this person worked for and with. After the rude awakening, this e-mail which included supervisors and higher management, (reply all) , The “truth” actually got that person canned. Immediately. Nobody could believe how 2-faced that employee was. It was a nasty shock.

I am very “into” the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation work and was in the process of training for the Breast Cancer 3-Day in Phoenix 3-years ago. During that time, one of my team members sent me an email at work about ensuring women get mammograms, and the email was very descriptive on what happens during the procedure. At the end of the missive, there was a statement/question comparing the pain a woman endures during the procedure to how it would feel to a certain part of a man’s anatomy, using slang terminology to that portion of his body! I failed to read the email completely through and emailed it to some women at work, one of whom took offense and filed a complaint against me! I was so embarrased! It took me a good while to get over it.

I once sent an email to my entire office, and meant to refer to my good female friend as “vertically challenged” (she was short). Only, as I typed the email and sent it off quickly, I realized afterwards that I accidentally referred to her as “gravitationally challenged”.

Iwas recently in a departmental tug of war and accidently said something negative about the person and not thinking sent reply instead of forward and the person i spoke badly about got the email!!! Boy did i feel stupid. Needless to say our relationship is now “chilly”. Never send an email in haste before you verify who is getting it!

I worked for a major media organization and when instant messaging was new, I was promoting this feature to a large group at a weekend conference out on the west coast and one of my co-workers back east noticed that I was online, thought I was at home doing work and he made a joke referring to oral sex and you guessed it, it was up on a large screen with me facing the audience not knowing that the message is as large as me over my shoulder and everyone laughed out loud. I quickly deleted the message and when I told the sender after the event he was cracking up.

At a previous job in college I blew the whistle on two people who were having an affair at the office. The affair was mostly hearsay, I never witnessed anything. I blew the whistle via email with some people on the staff. I’m lucky that I wasn’t taken to court for slander. I was asked to not return to my college job.

Many years ago, a VP was in charge of 1,200 or telecom engineers. One day, this telecom service provider company was flooded with chained-emails with video clip depicting some guy’s penis got cut-off. Dozens of employees whom forwarded the email with same subject line were fired immediately. That VP was able to find many of them a job else where. A very difficult day for that VP, but zero tolerance policy was strictly enforced.

Matt, a friend of ours, got a six-figure job at Deloitte & Touche, the accounting firm. Sent a message (”subject line: Test message”) by another friend to confirm Matt’s new email address, he responded by changing the subject line to: “Testical massage” (he can’t even spell testicle correctly) and accidentally sent it to the WHOLE company. He didn’t last there long. True story, I swear.

I haven’t sent any yet, but been the recipient of a few. I work for a medical publisher. We had rejected a manuscript submitted by docs. The doc meant to forward my e-mail to his co-authors but accidentally included me. He blasted the journal as being second rate, horrible etc. I just replied and said – ‘Hello, you probably meant to send this to someone else.” to let him know to be more cautios. He tried back tracking – and it made for a good story.

I have also been cc’d on plenty of e-mails from executives in companies berrating an employee and using e-mail to all in the company as a public forum for the lashing. Each time this happens I e-mail the exec and inform him/her that he/she “accidentally” sent this to everyone – just to make my point. And each time, they haven’t gotten my message or ignored it and said that they meant to send it to everyone. SO – executives out there reading this – don’t send criticisms meant for one to a group or all. It is completely unprofessional, selfish, manipulative, cowardly and unconcionable.

This has got to be one of the biggest screw ups of all time, in terms of improper email usage.

About 10 years ago I worked for one of the big six consulting firms. I was on a client site where we were developing a software product for this particular client. Our firm had probably 40+ consultants on site and were billing the client @ 175 – 350 per hour per consultant. There were major cost overruns on the project, relations between the client’s management and our managing partners were at an all time low.

We had a consultant that had been on the project for about 8 weeks send out an e-mail to the project management team, many who were female, that contained pornographic images and was laced with profanity. The kid thought he was sending the email to his friend(s) but selected the wrong email group to send to.

Needless to say, this didn’t go down well. The consultant sent the email @ 11 am and was fired by 1:00 pm. After days of neogiations and agreeging to give back close to a million dollars, we were able to salvage the project but the work environment was damaged almost beyond repair and the majority of the remaining work was performed off site.

We have a chat program we use at work to send messages. When a person sends you a message, there is this button you press that says “got it!” to acknowledge the message was recieved. When I first started, I didn’t know there was a set button for that, so I quickly typed it out and pressed enter. Unfortunaltey, it said “go tit!”

MS Outlook has a great feature called “Recall this Message”. Sounds like some of you geniuses should learn how to use your software.

I once called another employee an “idiot” to another employee over email…somehow i hit PRINT instead of SEND and the “idiot” is the one who found it. There is no explaining that away

There was a young, just out of college management trainee in my office that kept a candy dish on her desk. I took candy from that dish so often that it seemed I was eating it all. Well, one day someone brought muffins into the office. I e-mailed this lady to tell her about them and ask if she had one yet. She replied that she had indeed gotten ot then in time and had a muffin on her desk. I wrote back and told her I was going to come over to her desk and eat her muffin (remember the candy dish.) Well, she responded as if I said something wrong, and I later learned that ‘muffin’ is supposedly slang for something else. Apparently, the e-mail was shared with everyone in the office and I suffered much embarrasment, but I talked with my supervisor immediately and everything worked out. Thereafter, my e-mails have been short and to the point.

I received a verbal offer from another company. I was so excited, that I typed up my “I’m resigning!” email and added the email addresses of most of my current co-workers, including my boss. I meant to hit save, but hit send instead – - – and of course, the “new” company retracted their offer later that day, so I was out of a job!

Everyone gets upset and it’s easy to want to write an email blasting the people we are mad at.

My best advise, which I have had to do at times, is write your email, but leave all the To/CC/BCC fields blank (so noone sees your rant even if you hit Send). Get out all your frustration, then when you are done, delete the email and go get some fresh air. No one gets hurt, you have a job, and maybe later you can go rewrite that email expressing your views in a more professional and constructive manner.

I worked for a company as an application support rep. One morning a customer called very upset about a problem she was experiencing. This woman chewed me up and spit me out and right before she hung up the phone she stated that “the situation really steamed her A$$.”

About a month later, the customer sent a photo of herself at a wedding to a co-worker of mine who in-turn sent it to me so I could see what the person who chewed me out so badly looked like.

Well, I’m rather talented at Photoshop so I made a few changes to the photo. I added a smoke effect so it appeared that steam was coming out of her A$$ and put one of those little Arby’s hat above her head, then e-mailed my artwork back to my co-worker and a few others, who forwarded the art to others, who forwarded it to others. This went on all day. Big mistake on my part.

Another co-worker who had a similar last name as the customer apparently was the only person in the company who didn’t see the photo so the co-worker who I initially sent the photo to attempted to send it to it to the other co-worker via e-mail but sent it to the customer instead who immediately called asking what was going on.

We were both very embarrassed but neither of us got fired. I’ve never been so worried about being fired in my life.

I know a teacher who was at her desk composing an e-mail to another teacher about a first date the night before that had ended up in wild sex. The e-mail was graphic and they did EVERYTHING.

Well, she got up to get some water and a student slipped to her computer, scanned her mail, and quickly sent it to everyone on the district e-mail system. Like 2000 staff, teachers, etc.

She was highly embarassed and got rebuked but did not have to quit.

I used to work for a large international company with around 100k employees. I assume this was done on purpose out of stupidity, but a secretary in one of the offices received one of those emails back in the late 90’s that says so and so is beta testing a new email tracking system (or maybe marketing a new product…or something similar) you will receive money for the number of people you forward to. Yup, you guessed it, she fell for it and thought she would get rich by forwarding it to 100k employees around the world. Instead she got fired the same day and not to mention tied up the entire firms email servers…it didn’t help that people hit “reply to all” when telling her that it was a hoax…then people “replying to all” to tell everyone not to reply to all. It was a mess, but pretty funny nonetheless.

I was having trouble with a department at work. I sent a note explaining the problem to my boss to see if she could intervene. The last paragraph of the e-mail was “…if they can get their heads out of their asses.”

My boss read the note and did not see the last paragraph, since it was “under” the bottom of the screen. So she simply forwarded it to the department in question.

I spent the next week apologizing profusely.

Our department boss was not a very popular guy. On one friday afternoon I have decided to make my coworkers´ weekend a little better, so I emailed boss´s resignation announcment message to the whole company from the computer in his unlocked office.It was a good weekend for most.

Office e-mail serves several purposes: One, it saves paper; it expedites communications among employees etc etc. However, it allows companies to “spy” on what employees are doing and saying. I used to work in a company that employed several people to do just that. But wait! This is the land of free expression and free speech right? Just don’t try to exercise these two abstractions at work.

I’m constantly amazed by stunts supposedly highly educated corporate personal pull with e-mail. We don’t even want to get started on the spelling and other grammatical errors of those with advanced degrees and doctorates (simply beyond belief).

The most common mishap of these corporate “leaders” is that so many inadvertantly hit the “reply to all” button when making comments intended for a business buddy on a message originally delivered to a group address.

It really makes you wonder how some folks ever manage to graduate high school, let alone earn an advanced degree.

A former employee of mine learned one lesson the hard way. Don’t bad mouth the IT director to your friends using email. I was monitoring this employee’s outbound messages after I notices a huge spike in the number of emails he was sending…(200 + messages a day… of which, 150+ were personal). Not only did he lose his job, he lost his unemployment insurance when I had HR challenge his claim that he was fired without cause. The arbitrator was shocked to see the 3000 personal emails (from a 5 week period!) that we produced as evidence. I now have excellent monitoring software… not only can I read corporate email, I can read any messages employees send using personal accounts such as GMail and Yahoo. Always assume someone could be reading everything that appears on your screen the moment you see it or type it.

My husband was forwarded an email by a family member that contained many inappropriate images, mostly of women getting revenge on their cheating ex’s. Busting out car windows, spray painting houses, etc.

We have probably ALL seen these images since they have floated around the net for some time.

However he had one of “those” co-workers ( we all know who they are ) who just happened to be passing by when he opened the email, she was being nosey looking over his shoulder saw the images and freaked out. She threw a HUGE hissy fit and informed his boss.

After 10 years on the job, a file cabinet full or commendations and the highest sales record on the team my husband was fired over a picture in an email! Pathetic!!

But it turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to us.

He ended up with a better, less stressful and higher paying job!

So THANKS to the nosey tattle tale co-worker and the inconsiderate manager at BOA who fired him. =)

I once had a terrible boss about whom I was keeping a personal email folder (every dumb email he sent I would save, and occasionally when he did something stupid I would write myself an email and save it — I know, VERY dumb). One day I went to email myself, and hit sent before I realized that because I had Chris on my mind, I had put his name in the address! I sat there for two minutes, frozen, until he wrote back and asked what the email meant. Fortunately I was able to concoct a story that barely passed the red-face test, but I’ve always wondered if he fully realized what it was and just couldn’t bear to acknowledge it.

I sent an email to some people I _thought_ were friends, complaining about something my boss had planned, and encouraging them to ditch the meeting along with me. But one of them forwarded it to him, and I got in HUGE trouble…

Anyone who questions the intelligence of George W. Bush should know this: the day he was elected, he told friends and family he was no longer using e-mail, as it would probably wind up in the wrong hands. I think our President is a lot brighter than most of the people who’ve written their “confessions” here. Word to the wise, people: anything you write on the company computer belongs to the company, not you. I have warned many, but they don’t believe it. They think it’s like U.S. mail–your personal property. Uh, as you can tell from reading the comments here, nothing could be further from the truth.

In my Management class, the first day my professor told me, do not do not send out emails when you are mad, because it will gets you into a lot of troubles. Guess that is true.

I was the manager of a large IT company in Norcross, GA. I was carrying on an affiar with one of the women on my sales team and another woman in another department. Sadly, they had the same first names. So, when I sent an email thanking Jen for the incredible latenight “dinner” the previous evening she replied “you’re welcome but weren’t you out with your friends last night?” Because you see, it was Jennifer who provided me my wonderful “dinner.” What an idiot. Anyway, this prompted me to quit my job and start my own company and now I’m rich. So it all worked out great.

You should check the following civil lawsuit filed in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of North Carolina, Western Division: Frederick Aikens, Plaintiff v William E. Ingram, Jr et al, Case number 5:06-CV-00185-D. This one is not funny…..This is serious business. Check the allegations and follow the case. If it goes to trial, will likely have far reaching ramifications for how emails are treated in a military environment. I’m still shocked that folks have been able to get away with this so far. We’ll see.

A coworker and I were emailing each other back and forth on how bad our boss is. By mistake I ended up cc-ing him on it and didn’t realize what I had done untill it was gone. Turning pale white I quickly made my way to his office ready to admit that I had done wrong. but when I noticed he wasn;t there I snuck in, deleted the email from his inbox and emtied the deleted items folder. He enevr suspected a thing.

Was responsible for collecting signed time sheets. A new employee emailed a signed time sheet with a good looking electronic signature. I wrote back, that’s a “sweet” looking signature. He reported me to HR for sexual harrassment.

I’m the Manager of an e-mail support team for a large company. We receive 5-10 requests per week from HR to provide them access to employees email. They can read everything! Including the emails that you deleted. Get yourself a G-mail account and keep the personal stuff off of company servers.

I sent an email to all of our staff worldwide – about 100,000 people – announcing a new product line being launched. Unfortunately I had checked the box “receipt required” and was emailed a system generated receipt as every person opened it. I could not delete them fast enough for about three days.

Nope, NEVER have I had an email snafu at work. That what free services like gmail, yahoo, lycos, aol, etc are for–personal email!

the CEO of a company that was a client sent numerous emails that were highly suggestive. They were so embarrassing, that I asked to be put on another account.

I am a national sales manager and just three weeks ago, I sent my CEO an e-mail indicating that I was no longer able to trust one of my dealers (XYZ Sales) as they were shipping our product to China in order to replicate it and sell it under their brand name. He accidentally forwarded the e-mail to the owner of XYZ Sales. Now any credibility that I had with this customer is down the tubes.

An errant e-mail from an HR executive at a former employer helped me bail out of a job that I no longer liked…and collect the 10 years severance pay plus a few other ‘partying gifts’ that I had sooo earned.

The e-mail started of with: “The bitch called again….”

I was the “B” – subject of that email. This was in the very early days of email when hardly anyone knew the dangers. I was accidentally copied on this message intended only for a member of the Exec’s staff. I don’t think anyone lost their jobs over it…but I didn’t care. I considered it my ‘Get Out Of Jail’ card…the minute that it arrived on my computer, I threw my hands in the air and said: Thank You, Jesus!

I sent an email suggesting that the 5 wealth principals in our firm only receive one gift for christmas, instead of two. I was suggesting that 25 employees shell out $15 per person instead of the $30 asked for. Really I did this because I hated one pricipal (two faced sob) and didn’t care for another. It was used against me and I was later let go. Actually a blessing because now I own my own company and probably would not have started it if I wasn’t given a push.

I once referred to someone as “not the brightest light on the Christmas tree” and accidentally copied them. The e-mail was the forwared to what seemed to be every EVP and SVP in the company and it took a lot of apologizing to make amends. Turns out I wasn’t the brightest light on the Christmans tree…

My buddy sent out a mass email to several friends and family members with pictures of his wife and two twin daughters at the girls catholic confirmation. It is an adorable picture, but being me, I just could not help noticing the ample bosom of my buddies wife. He told me recently she had breast augmentation surgery and it was evident. I replied “the twins look gorgeous, and the two new twins Dorrie is carrying look pretty damn good too!!!” I sent it out to everyone without realizing it. This included grandmothers, etc. Funny story–but I did receive a few pointed rebukes in my email box from several unintended recipients. As for my buddy–he laughed like crazy and his wife loved the attention, but I cannot say that happiness was shared by all.

I once worked with a painfully slow co-worker who kept us all in suspense wondering if we’d make our group deadlines. I wrote my buddy at work: “Geez, it probabaly takes Carol 3 hours to watch “60 Minutes”!” Well, you guessed it–having just typed her name, I sent it right to Carol. I had a very dramatic confrontation with her soon after. I found out she was pretty slow at forgiving, too!

I think my favorite email horror story is of poor Joseph Dobbie a UK Graphic Designer who sent his 18th. century style overly-heartfelt email oeuvre to a gal he met at a party rather than ring her by phone. The recipient then forwarded this email to her sister, then her sister sent it to her friends and then found its way onto the front page of a London Magazine.

This was especially surprising because a tech-savvy person like Mr. Dobbie should’ve thought about the eternal life-cycle of an email, and the limited security a standard Outlook message can have (i.e. do not forward).

I attended Mr. Shipley’s talk in Seattle and many of the great things that have made email a great tool are also its flaws.

On a personal note, when I first got trained on a mass email tool, I clicked plain text instead of rich HTML and my very nicely crafted message to customers went out as plain text and my nice buttons header and layout just didn’t go.

I was having problems with another employee who was our manager’s pet so I copied our manager on some emails between this other employee and I so they would know what was going on and have a record of it.

Our manager actually wrote me up for this claiming I was writing too many emails and then later used that write-up along with some other things as an excuse to fire me.

I was having an office fling with the IT Manager at a bank. We have been emailing some borderline racy stuff when one day he came to my office and said that his wife got a hold of our emails and she wanted him out the house. Apparently, he left his computer on when he left his desk and someone forwarded his emails to his wife. She then was able to locate my husband and forwarded the email to him who then emailed my supervisor and told him I was having an affair and then sent a TOTALLY different version of my emails to the rest of the company making it look like I was a stalker. My lovely IT person went into work and deleted eveyone’s emails EXCEPT for the HR Director who ran her mouth around the office. I was truly embarrassed and I am so happy I had jury duty that week. I was almost fired but my IT man saved our jobs. We both eventually left our spouses (we were both in abusive relationships) and our jobs thereafter. I truly learned a lesson after that encounter never to do that again.

I am a manager at a manufacturing company and received and email from a subordinate that she thought she was sending to another employee about ME. It was part of a string they had sent back and forth to each other. She was lucky I replied to it stating its unprofessional nature and my disappointment in it. But I never forgot it, and lost respect for her after.

Shortly after I was hired as a Maintenance Supervisor by my company I sent an e-mail out to what I thought was my plant but it turned out to be the world wide company. It had to do with discussing how people were misconnecting a lift truck to the battery charger and how if they needed instruction in another language to let me know. I got written up for that and the president of the company (who got the e-mail) sent me a reply saying she wished people would shovel the sidewalk at the plant she was at.

This is for Matt from Albany, NY, bigstring.com is a phishing site blocked by both Norton and McAfee, please be careful of what information you send.

I worked at a company that was an 8:00 to 5:00 agency. Our IT dept sent an email at 4:15 one day stating that the computers would be going down at 4:30 and that we needed to log off before then. I replied to our IT guy, with whom I joked with regularly, “WTF!! Could you have told us this earlier, I guess we can go home early today!” Well I instead hit reply all and it went to every person in our agency!! The IT guy was able to recall it from most of the email accounts, but not our Exec Director. I mostly got kudos from my coworkers about how that was what they wanted to say, but also, I got a nice write up in my file (no one really cared though…including our ED) about how that was inappropriate and how I would be careful from now on.

I am really careful with what I do at work. I work in the technology and engineering field and assume that anything I type on company equipment can be captured and monitored. The worst that has happened in my case is forgetting to specify a “Subject” when sending out an email.

I once sent an e-mail to collegeaues in other colleges in the state that our President gave us a big “Christmas bonus” of letting us go home at 4:30 p.m. on Christmas eve day. I said “Whoopie” I was hoping for a turkey. Turns out one of the collegeaues forwards the e-mail to their President, why does not our college be nice and let people go home early on Christmas eve. So that President forwards the e-mail to my President. The day after Christmas I am called to the office to explain my message and what a horrible employee I was. I still would have liked a turkey better.

The Chief Financial Officer of ScriptPro Pharmacy Automation in Mission, KS (a Kansas City suburb) accidentally sent a COMPANYWIDE e-mail with a link to a file that contained EVERY SINGLE EMPLOYEE’S SOCIAL SECURITY NUMBER!!!

It was meant to be a link to a letter from the 401K investment firm.

Why such a sensitive document was on a publically accessible server is beyond me.

I left the company shortly there after, and Doug Maughn “fell on his sword” a few months after that …

I was sharing my good news with friends, but definitely not with co-workers or supervisors yet — or so I thought; I wanted to plan very carefully when to let my boss know that I was pregnant. I must have thought I was “safe” because, obviously, I was trusted enough to work in the office of the Chairman/CEO! At the time I felt furious and violated by that *#@!* in Human Resources, but I learned my lesson. I didn’t lose my job over it, but I did decide not to go back to work after I had my beautiful baby!

I don’t have a printer at home, so I emailed myself my erotic novel I wanted to proofread. I get to the office before anyone and sent it to the printer, which jammed with pages 33 and 34 hopelessly. All I could do was bang doors and turn it off and on and with pieces falling off, I finally got it unjammed only to send it to the entire English Dept. when I tried to resave it under my “english dept. email folder”.

I got an A!

While working at a mid-size law firm I accidently sent an email to a high powered male executive at a brokerage firm an email that stated “You the woman.” The email was intended for a fellow female associate (and friend)at the firm at the firm who had spent long hours working on a case for this particular executive.

Embarrasing, but there were no negative ramifications from it.

I once used profanity and expeletives in describing a particularly difficult client, to a supplier.

I’d been doing a bunch of copying and pasting, and accidentally put the Client’s email address on the B.C.C. line.

Suffice to say, she was no longer a client after receiving the email, and frankly I was able to cut the Prozac in half after losing her.

When the cable company I was working for switched from local call centers to a national one, the national call center made hundreds of mistakes every day. Me and another co-worker, who was a good friend of mine, were assigned the task of every day making a note of each error. I would send the errors I found to him and then he would email them all to the call center.

One day, frustrated that the call center’s errors had added three hours of work to my day, I emailed him the errors with a note at the top saying that I wished these people would stop making errors and that they must be staffing the center with a bunch of monkeys (I’ve cleaned that up; there was quite a lot of profanity).

My co-worker didn’t notice the note and just copy-ed and pasted the whole thing into his email, which got sent to the entire management staff at the call center. A day later, I had to write a formal letter of apology and just managed to keep my job.

I was working in a section with a boss that wasn’t quite, er, pleasant and who had a reputation for being a hard nose. A bunch of my former co-workers and I were planning a practical joke on our old/last boss and I accidentally let the cat out of the bag… and I immediately sent a message to those co-workers stating “Abort the mission. The hawk f-ed up!” and clicked on Send… and powered down my PC. Someone else logged on at the same time (this was on a terminal) and for some reason they got all my e-mails on their screen. And were kind enough to forward to the aforementioned hard-nosed boss. I called his Secretary in a panic because the person generously included all our names on the e-mail. The Secretary laughed when I told her what happened and she was so cool… she said “He doesn’t even know how to read his e-mail, I do it all for him… I’ll just erase it.

I got promoted a few years later. I make a lot more than Mr. Hard Nose now. And I learned NOT to turn off my PC before loggin off…

I used to co-own a tech company and one day my partner was checking some things on the mail servers. A while later he asked me, “So what did you think of that email I forwarded?” I told him I hadn’t received an email. It was rather amusing to see his eyes change to this look of horror…yes, you guessed it, instead of forwarding he had Replied.

Seems the email in question was directed to one of our employees from some girl he knew in Austin who was ranting about it being that time of the month, a syphillis outbreak and a couple other things. My partner had sweetly said “So you think you’re having a bad day”, when he thought he was forwarding it to me.

Needless to say, the girl and our employee were quite peeved! LOL!

I remember a time when our Administrative Assistant sent out a very steamy email to her girlfriend describing the juicey, intimate details of a weekend tryst at the beach with her boyfriend. The lengthy emai, read like an X-Rated Harlequin romance novel. The only problem was….she sent it to the entire sales force instead of her intended girlfriend. I couldn’t help myself and called her on the phone and began reading a segment of her email. Needless to say, she was mortified.

I referred to someone as a moron in an email to someone else concerning said individual’s moronic actions that upset me at work. Eight hours later I come to find out that the email somehow was forwarded to this person and the assistant director of the govt agency I was working for at the time. Had I not worked for a govt agency I would have certainly lost my job.

An administrator once sent out an email to every employee at our office, about an upcoming potluck where he mentioned he personally was making some chili. He was trying to get the point across that everyone was encouraged to bring their own bowls, but unfortunately he added an extra ‘e’ and the final email read: “I am personally cooking the chili, but its up to you to bring your own bowels.”

I sent an email to my Operations VP outlining the stupidity of one of our largest clients and the problems we were having with them.

In turn, he sent an email to that client talking about how much we valued their business and enjoyed their partnership. Unfortunately, he was responding to my email and added them to the To: line, so right underneath his nice email was mine — the first line being something to the effect of “The regional offices are, for lack of a better word, incompetent.”

I kept my job, but it was a hot topic around here for a while.

Well for me I never made the mistake, fortunately. However I remember once when we had a new IT guy on our team and he did something, and everyones e-mail became veiwable by everyone else. There was this one particular supervisor (married) who was having an affair with one of his direct reports also married. Apparenetly theonly way they could communicate was by e-mail, which was also very detailed… Needless to say, it caused a horrible stink and provided fodder for office gossip for years.

I am the main Systems Admin for a large company. While I have never SENT any email that was an issue, I see it ALL. I know who’s having an affair with who, which company officer’s “business trips” are really covers for affairs and flings, and so on.

I keep it all in a double encrypted file on a Solaris machine (cause almost no one here but me knows Solaris) that has a fully passworded and encrypted HDD.

So far, it’s gotten me two promotions and a raise, from those who really should know better…

Hey Michael S. and Jim from Scranton, PA….Fact – I am the Assistant Regional Manager not the Assistant TO the Regional Manager.

Another dangerous game which can go awry is when you’re having a personal problem and try to google your symptoms. I typed in “vagina smells” and got a message saying that I was banned from looking at inappropriate material (thanks, large company software) and my IT department was notified that I attempted to look at smut. It’s good to know that there are people I work with who are aware that, for a brief moment in time, my vagina smelled.

my boss sent out an email to everyone promoting the activites of a coworker that had stayed late making calls

i typed an email that said only people who cant get their work done during normal time have to stay late and accidentally clicked reply to all

it was funny, i laughed as i was being fired because i hated that job and everyone that worked there

I made the mistake of intrusting a sub-contractor who I highly respected with my personal commentary regarding my company’s actions on events he was involved in. For instance, rather than just sending an e-mail stating – “The manager wants a conference call with you at 11:00AM” – I’d say, “Manager X is on a power trip again, he wants a conference call with you at 11:00PM, he’s going to surprise you with …. Be prepared to defend….”

Well twice the twit forwarded my e-mail, unedited, to all parties involved including my manager when making his reply! I wised up and recognized which party my check was coming from. I don’t put anything in writing that can’t be read by all.

That manager is currently trying to make this subcontractor the scapegoat on a troubled project – and I’m just sitting back and watching the sub sink.

Here’s one for ya…on my second week at work in the engineering department at a large defense contractor I noticed that a co-worker/friend of mine had a picture of the Diet Coke guy (ripped guy, no shirt, flexing for the ladies, and drinking Diet Coke of course) on her screen…I commented and she said it was from her daughter (whom I was also friends with).

I promptly went to computer and attempted to send her daughter the following email, “You and your mother are perverts.”

A few seconds later a friend in another cubicle asks me over the wall if I just quit. I asked him why and he explained that he received an email from me saying that he, and his mother were perverts. Somehow, someway, the email didn’t get sent to her daughter, but it got sent to all of engineering…even up to the director/VP level.

I was able to recall the message, but since we were in the midst of transitioning to Outlook from an old email client I couldn’t be sure that it was retracted from all 350+ inboxes. Thus I had to issue a written apology explain myself. Then had to personally apologize to a few foreign nationals who did not speak great english and were very offended by my email.

After a talk with my PM, HR, and the VP of engineering, then yearly reminders to watch what I send out via email the worst was over. My embarrassment has now subsided, since it’s been nearly 9 years….but the subject still comes up in conversations from time to time.

I got the following message from our head of IT one day:

—–Original Message—–
Subject: personal confession

Hi Benny,

I know this is a very unprofessional thing to say, but the truth is that I have always found you very attractive. I’m not usually into guys, but in your case I would definitely make an exception.

Yours truly,
Phil Xxxxxxx

—————–
I was still scratching my head trying to figure out if this was real when another message came in from Phil.
—–Original Message—–
Benny,
I don’t know what Sam sent you from my email account but don’t believe it.

Phil
—————–
Sam had slipped into Phil’s office and sent me the first Email as a joke.

—————–
Here’s a BIG tip for everyone:

Log out when you get up from your computer and have your computer set up to require a password to continue after the screen saver starts. Also make the screen saver timeout very short.

It could be VERY difficult to explain why an embarrassing Email came from YOUR Email account that requires YOUR password to log on.

A colleague sent a message to a friend, detailing a romantic encounter he’d had the night before. Our email system had a glitch and several messages had their headers swapped, meaning contents of one email went to the addressee of another. My coworker’s bawdy message went instead to his boss, the head of IT. Fortunately he was a good-natured guy and chose to see it as a wake-up call to all of us, both that we had the email glitch and that maybe we shouldn’t be sending stuff like that at work.

I worked for a large company. A female coworker meant to send an extremely sexually explicit email to her boyfriend, Al Linville (not is real name), instead she clicked on the email group of ‘All’. She quit 48 hours later.

When e-mail was new and I was green, an invitation to celebrate a coworker’s 10th anniversary was sent to my entire 75+ person department.

I shot a quick note to a friend that said ‘If I am here 10 years, don’t throw a party for me, just take me out back and shoot me instead.’ Of course, by accident, I sent it to the entire department rather than only to my friend. Fortunately, I was able to recall the majority of messages before they were read, but about a quarter of the department saw it, including my boss. Attrition and morale in the company had always been a big problem, and he asked me to meet with him so he could understand what management could do to improve the negative sentiment employees held toward the company.

At a former job, a fellow coworker was not happy with her job. She was emailing her friend on company email and started complaining about work. She stated in the email to her friend that she was going to switch to her personal email so her boss couldn’t read what she was writing. Well, she forgot to switch and just kept complaining about work…and about the boss! She called him a few very rude names in the email. Lo and behold, he read that email and she was fired the next day!

I emailed my director complaining about the flaws in her promotion practices and how they weren’t inclusive (behind the door promotions). I can never get a promotion from my employer of 9000+ employees again. HR and hiring managers after managers will not live it down. Signed: Doomed.

I wanted to forward a “guys only” (photo included)email to one of my buddies. When I typed in the first letter of his email address, the window dropped down with all email addresses beginning with that letter. There were only two, so I clicked on his and sent it; except it wasn’t his I clicked on……it was my daughter-in-law’s. She called me, and I could feel myself turning bright red. She was a great sport about it, but we agreed that it would be best if the accident were not brought to the attention of my son.

(okay to post my city and state, but please no name or even initials, for the obvious reason).

A member of our force management group had the responsibility of sending out a daily status reports to our leadership team — she accidently left the letter ‘o’ off of the intended subject line of “Headcount Report”.
I read the message while driving home and nearly ran off the road.

This is why I mostly refrain from responding to virtually any “joke” e-mail circulated by my collegues but rather simply delete them…furthermore, I don’t have time to mess with that kind of stuff.

Though technically not “office” e-mail, these were rather embarrassing to my wife. I’m in the military, and my military e-mail address uses “firstname.lastname” for its addressees. I use “Pat.lastname”, though my family all refers to me as Patrick.

While I was in Iraq three years ago, my wife kept acccidentally sending emails expressing her love, support and longing to “Patrick.lastname,” some poor kid attending a military school back in the States. Her apologies to him would go to me. She eventually got it figured out.

Then, one day I received an e-mailed photo of an attractive young woman saying she couldn’t wait for me to come home. It was supposed to go to “Patrick.lastname”. I thanked her for HER support, and referred her to the proper Patrick.

I was in a project three years ago and our PM who lived in another country only appeared when he had to kicked someone. I got one of those and I forward the e-mail to my fellow team mates with a comment like “this is typical [name] b.s.”. I had a mail list and I sent it there without remembering the PM was also part of that list! I had a LOT of explaining to do, but It was a good chance to speak our minds…

I was working as a product manager for a large company.I got a request from a sales rep in the field for some support. I had travelled with this guy a number of times, been out bar hopping with him. I thought I knew him.
It was end of quarter and lots of pressure to close business. He asked for some data, I forwarded the request to the appropriate PLM. I said he’d take care of it. Turns out he didn’t and didn’t tell me. The sales rep sends a note next day looking for the data. So I sent him a flip note telling him to down a few more cold ones and check his inbox again because he obviously hadn’t been drinking enough. He forwards to the whole department right up to the Exec V.P. asking if this was the kind of commitment corporate had for making our numbers. I had to hand write apologies to everyone on the list and was layed off at the next re-org….Learned my lesson…

One of our female colleagues, a South Asian, had sent an invitation for a luncheon party a few years ago. It read something on the lines “you can bring your own cock!” Obviously, she meant to type Coca Cola (Coke), but ended up typing cock! It was pretty funny. We teased her a bit, but also had the sense not make her feel embarrassed too much.

At my first job out of college, the maintenance department sent out an email warning that the following weekend would be used for repainting hallways and that the fumes may bother people working then. I forwarded (I thought) this email to a coworker friend and said something like “show up this weekend for free paint fumes”. What I’d done is reply back to the maintenance dept. who forwarded my reply to my boss. He was cool about it, but yowsers, I learned a good lesson about email!

Several years ago my wife and I worked at the same large company, but she was on a different campus. The company was having a blow out fund raiser after work for United Way. Generally, I’m easy going but I had been having a terrible day. My wife forwards the flyer to me and asks “Hey do you want to do this after work, it might be fun”. For some reason that eludes me even now I replied with a rail against United Way, waste my company money on a party.. blah blah blah, really ripping into them. And yes, you guessed it, I had replied to the attachment which came directly from our CEOs office. Needless to say, I learned how to do a retraction in record time… I’m certain I would have been fired and it taught me a HUGE lesson on many fronts.

I don’t quite understand why you would ask this and why anyone would repeat for the whole world the contents of an embarrassing email. If it was embarrassing for the limited audience to see it the first time, why would anyone want to experience the embarrassment a second time in front of all of your readers?

One morning B.C. (before caffeine) I sent a note to an old pal I’m fond of.

It started “You’re freaking adorable.”

It then continued with a recap of the previous night’s LOST episode and some slightly “blue” references on my part related to the storylines. (It was the week with the cats, and Sayid… fortunately I only hinted at my intended jokes. )

Problem: instead of clicking “reply” on a note from my FRIEND, I had clicked reply while my “select” bar was sitting on a note from my BOSS.

I never noticed that she was the recipient, even after I sent it off.

Fortunately, she has a sense of humor, and stopped by to ask me if I MEANT to give her that LOST recap.

After turning two shades of red I stammered “Did I call you adorable?”

She confirmed that indeed, I had. For a day or so she would say “Don’t you think I’m adorable?” whenever I was with a group of friends. (This, of course, forced me to confess to them…)

She was probably my coolest boss ever, because she let it go after that.

We worked with a vendor that wasn’t meeting deadlines that we assigned. I sent an email explaining my dissastisfaction with the company to upper level management. The bone head in the upper leval management fowarded it to the vendor. It wasn’t written for their eyes. Working with them afterword was a little akward.

I was a manager at an insurance firm and was very tired after months of overtime and email failures on servers from hardware failures.
I wrote the typical email to the CEO, Pres. and VP of the company telling them what a jerk my VP of IT was and that he has cost the company millions due to his lack of budgeting and not listening to the recommendations I had made. I was writing it and never meant to send it, but I clicked on the wrong button and away it went!
Needless to say, I no longer work in the biz at all, I was crucified and cast out of the business over a stupid email and being upset. Email can really hurt……never write what you don’t want on the front page of the newspaper I used to tell employees, I broke the cardinal rule, and I paid for it dearly.

While working at a biotech I was assigned to work with a particular individual for a large number of assignments. This person had a rather foul mouth in general and had a terrible habit of saying derogatory things about clients behind their backs.

On one occasion, we received an e-mail from a client; many people in our company were copied on the e-mail the client sent. My co-worker used the “reply to all” function but was careful to remove the address of the client. He sent an extremely deragatory e-mail that was very offensive, mocking the client. Unfortunately, he failed to notice a couple of other individuals copied on the e-mail: the client’s supervisor and another employee of that company.

The worst part? Nothing happened to my co-worker. He was reprimanded but no disciplinary action was taken. We eventually lost that client’s business and I believe this was one of the motivating factors.

As an IT Manager for a Corporation in Riverside, I had been called moments after an email was sent out by a Corporate Officer who had accidently sent out an email to lower level subordinates disclosing all Excecutive Management Salaries. Basically, the lower end employees saw what their supervisors salaries were. It causes chaos and uproar in the office/ company.

I was told to delete it from the person who sent it, who was not my boss… but I did the right thing as an IT Manager, and I had to report it to my Superior (Who was an Officer of the Corporation).

The best advice I received from my Professor at the University of New Mexico: Wait 24Hrs before you send out that email, because you might regret it!

I worked in the GA home office of a large home improvement chain. I was in the midst of an office fling with a FL co-worker. We were both single and we didn’t work directly with each other so there were no rules being broken.

She was heading to GA for a trip and I sent her an email that said “See you soon sweet t*ts.” I hit send and went to lunch.

Unfortunately it went to a co-worker in the GA office with a similar name who talked to other female co-worker’s about the email.

Thank goodness they were all cool, but I got razzed about it for many, many years.

I was working as a contractor at the State Department in Washington DC in 2003 during the invasion of Iraq. I thought I was sending an email in support of the troops to our office. Instead the email went out to the office contacts. For this particular office at State the contacts were all the Foreign embassies in Washington DC. Every government on Earth received my Ra Ra email in support of the troops in Iraq. I was fired the same day.

I wasn’t embarassed; however, I had the unfortunate responsibility of embarassing another. My fiance forwarded an email to me from an ex co-worker of mine who had been attempting to contact him and reignite their relationship behind my back. He thought it was funny because she had rejected him until he started dating me, so he forwarded it to me for a laugh.

After several, persistent emails from this young lady via company email, I decided to nip it in the bud (ala WalMart style) by replying to her and advising her to review the company’s email policy regarding its use for personal correspondence. I told her of the four previous instances I was aware of where the company (a major mutual fund organization) had terminated the employment of supervisors who had inappropriately used company email for personal use. I also advised her to desist from using it to contact my fiance due to the potential inappropriate nature of such communication and to prevent her communications from being received by unintended recipients via forwarding or carbon copy.

I was very kind to this unfortunate young lady-I did not cc or bcc her supervisor because I was not interested in harming her. I just wanted her to be aware that emails are forwardable and potentially damaging to a career. In San Antonio, TX, a gentleman committed suicide when another company forwarded his well-intentioned, personal email to his employer and he was forced to resign from his managerial position. The shame of his action overwhelmed him into regretably taking his own life.

Company email should be used for company purposes alone-that’s why it’s called company email. The internet sometimes makes it too easy for us to forget what is and isn’t appropriate. It seems that some of us need to get a little egg on our face every now and then in order to mind our manners on the job and get back to work.

I’m on a personal computer and sending this on my own, personal time, by the way. I try to practice what I preach because I’m not overly fond of eggs.

http://www.bigstring.com is an e mail system that protects people by allowing them to recall and erase messages even after they are read.

The other day I brought my pet monkey, Jango, into work. At 10AM I had a board meeting. Jango was sleeping in the corner of my office, so I shut the door. However, I forgot to close my laptop computer. When I came back Jango was on top of the keyboard jumping up and down, inadvertenly sending jiberish messages to the entire office and my clients.

I have been embarrased by many email mistakes in my lifetime — This is no longer the case. I now use BigString.com to send all my emails. BigString offers free recallable, erasable and selfdestructing emails. Now when I send an email that I want to take back, I just hit the recall button and the message is gone off of the other persons computer forever.

Wow Michael…You should have Dwight double check your stuff. He is assistant to the regional manager.

I took a Jamacain vacation with my supervisor (a woman) – let’s call her Jan. I took a picture of her lying down, looking alluring but with nothing important showing. When I returned to The Office, I was bragging to my friend Packer about my trip with my boss. He did not believe me. I meant to send an e-mail of the picture to Packer, but instead sent it to the Packaging Department. Of course, they forwarded around the entire company. Incidentally, they also made posters of the attached pictures and put them on the wall of the packaging department.

I am an executive at a medium to large size company.
I learned a long long time ago never use your work e-mail for anything personal.
I also don’t use my work phone for personal phone call, I use my cell phone.
I never leave anything personal in my office, I carry a bag and everything personal goes home with me that evening.
The newer copiers keeps a picture of anything that you make a copy of, which could be retrieved at any time.
Remember the world we live in today where we had a private/personal life has gone.

I sent an email to co-worker, who was also the wife of my boss, asking for some assistance on a project. I had just changed my desktop to a small laptop that had a much smaller keyboard. I meant to say, “Hi Cherie, I am sorry I know how busy you are.” However, the T and Y key were so much closer on that keyboard. So I actually sent, “Hi Cherie, I am sorry I know how BUSTY you are”. Spell check didn’t catch it of course. She replied with, “You don’t have apologize, but thanks for noticing.” I still get teased about that one.

I was in an e-mail war with some members of the purchasing group where I work. After repeated e-mails and meetings attempting to get them to “see the light” I was frustrated and sent a message on a “reply to all” to other managers like myself who were involved. The first sentence in the e-mail was, “These guys need to buy a clue!” Unfortunately, I mistakenly left one of the buyers on the list of people I sent it to. I then followed it with an apology directly thereafter. This was very bad form on my part.

While looking at some vacation options at work for a Florida trip with my fiance, I came across a good deal on a hotel room. I simply wrote in the e-mail, “Florida City. King size bed. [Hotel Name]. $60 per night.” Too bad I didn’t send this cryptic message to my fiance, but instead to a coworker at a remote office. Quite embarrassing, a bit of explaining, and we all had a good laugh.

My husband works out in the morning prior to going to work, and he sent me and email one day about how he forgot to pack underwear, thus he was not wearing any for the day. I thought I had deleted it, but it must have still been in my in box, and when I was forwarded an email to our Director of Career Services (I work at a university), I was so embarrassed, as soon as it was sent my phone rang and it was her on the other line. She was laughing so hard and just mentioned to make sure I double check what I am sending out. It was embarrassing for me and my husband. Email can be the best and worst.

yes,

I once sent an e.mail to my admin whom I was having an affair with, telling her that she’d left her panties at our hotel room.

i accidentely hit send to all the admin staff and i did..!

she resigned and I was fired..

I actually lost my job because I sent an email to CNN about my struggles in my career. My employer, who read all emails, asked me to explain, and told me that it sounded like “I was ready to resign another job”. I told him that I wasn’t, and he asked me to resign anyway.