Photo by dps.
It’s one of those things that’s probably happened to most people. You click the send button in your email client and then … oh no! … realise that the email is being sent to wrong person! You desperately scrabble to cancel the sending but … too slow … and that picture you meant to send to your girlfriend is now on its way to your boss. Oops!
As we covered in a recent article, something similar happened to an employee of the Rocky Mountain Bank in Wyoming (let’s call him “Bob”). It seems that poor old Bob was asked to send certain documents to a particular Gmail address, but actually sent them to a completely different Gmail address. Ouch! Upon realising his mistake, Bob sent another email to that address asking that the recipient delete the initial email unread and to contact the bank to discuss the situation. Alas, Bob – who was probably sweating profusely by this time – didn’t get a response (which is not particularly surprising – I think the majority of people would have assumed that Bob was a scammer/spammer/phisher!).
The bank then decided to take legal action against Google in order to force them to reveal the identity of the holder of the Gmail account. To avoid its customers learning about the breach, the bank also filed a motion to seal the case until the court ruled on the matter. The motion was denied with the judge commented, “An attempt by a bank to shield information about an unauthorized disclosure of confidential customer information until it can determine whether or not that information has been further disclosed and/or misused does not constitute a compelling reason that overrides the public’s common law right of access to court filings.”
What’s interesting to note is that according to the Wired report, when Bob realized his mistake, he “tried to recall the e-mail without success.” Why-oh-why do so many people seem to think that it’s possible to recall email? Yeah, if you’re sending from one Exchange account to another Exchange account, then its theoretically possible to recall a message, but the process is far from reliable. And if the email was sent to or from a personal account (Gmail, Hotmail or any other POP3 account), then you have no chance of recalling it. That’s right, once it’s gone it’s gone and there’s absolutely nothing you can do about it.
Consequently, hitting the send button should always be regarded as an irreversible action. To reduce the chances of an email oh-no moment, some people choose to defer sending (here’s how to defer sending in Outlook). To my mind, this really doesn’t help all that much – it simply means that the oh-no moment will happen later rather than sooner! The best advice, in my opionion, is to get into the habit of thoroughly checking both the content of a message and the recipient address(es) before sending. And this is especially important when you’re sending a message – either from home or from work – that contains any form of sensitive information. Doing this takes only seconds, but could save you or your business hours of time and/or spare you from humiliating PR.
Furthermore, in business environments, whoever is in charge of IT/email policy needs to make sure that employees understand that email messages can usually not be recalled and, depending on the sensitivity of the information that is handled, prohibit sending certain content via email. While not foolproof, awareness training and/or policy restrictions can substantially reduce the risk of a data breach.
Ok, but let’s assume the worst has happened and you’ve sent an email to the wrong person. How do you go about attempting to recall it? The process is extremely straightforward (these instructions are for Outlook 2007, the path will be different in other email clients):
- Open the message that you want to recall in Sent Items folder
- Click Other Actions > Recall This Message
- Check Delete unread copies of this message
- Click OK
Pretty easy, huh? Will it work? Probably not, but you have nothing to lose through trying!
