Company Information
Press
August 1, 2006
Think first, then hit send
By Shira Schoenberg
Kathleen Williams did not intend to read her boss's candid remarks following a performance review. But the comments were sent straight to her inbox. Her supervisor had typed the wrong name into the "to" field of the e-mail.
"It was all fine, though the language was a little salty," Williams laughed.
Williams, who has moved on from that job and is now director of public information at New England College, said her biggest e-mail fear these days is sending the wrong document or incorrect information to the press - something she has so far avoided.
Her strategy? "Just being very careful and making sure you're deliberate in what you do," she said.
Williams is not alone in being the recipient or sender of wayward e-correspondence. Jamie Napolitano, a one-man computer tech in Concord who markets himself under the name Extreme PCs, estimated that five out of 10 people will at some point misspell an e-mail address. That isn't a problem if the e-mail bounces back, but more often than not, someone else will receive the wayward love letter or vacation request.
Napolitano said he was once coordinating a family get-together and ended up contacting a complete stranger on the other side of the country.
"You type stuff, you don't check first, and the next thing you know, it goes to someone else," he said.
Napolitano cautions users never to send personal information over the web, for just that reason. "If you're sending really personal information, e-mail's not the best way to do it because of misspellings. You don't want to send personal information to some stranger -you can end up with fraud or identity theft."
As technology advances, some users are finding that pressing the send button is not quite as final as dropping a letter into a mailbox. America Online and Microsoft Outlook both have software that allows e-mails to be recalled as long as the e-mail has not yet been read and the recipient uses the same mail client as the sender.
Two years ago, Bigstring.com pioneered recallable, erasable, non-printable self-destructing e-mail. Chief Operating Officer Adam Kotkin explained that the sender can control where the e-mail ends up, what it says and how long it stays there. A user can, for example, instruct an e-mail to self-destruct after two views, or can correct a typo even after the sender has read it. It works on any server, for any amount of time, he said.
"A lot of people don't want e-mail sitting around for the rest of eternity," Kotkin said. He said the company is turning e-mail from a permanent record into an interaction more similar to a phone conversation. "We give ownership of e-mail back to the sender."
The idea came to him, Kotkin said, when a girl he knew took a photo of her ex-boyfriend from an e-mail and pasted his face all over Manhattan cautioning women, in off-color language, not to date him.
The company now has thousands of users, Kotkin said, for both personal and business e-mail. The most popular use of the personal e-mail is for dating. For example, potential dates may send pictures of themselves through e-mail but instruct them to self-destruct after a couple of views, so the recipients can't forward them to their friends. The software is also used frequently for price quotes and job applications, he said.
But for e-mail users who have not yet switched to Eraseable-Recallable E-mail, experts offer a simpler solution to wayward e-mails: be careful.
Pamela Walsh, communications director for Gov. John Lynch, said she keeps her press list in a separate folder from her staff list, and always double checks who she lists as a recipient. "It's always good to make sure you send it to the right person," she said.
Walsh also tries to keep a simple, but easily forgotten, fact in mind: "I operate on the rules that e-mails are easily forwarded," she said.
Steve Barrie, a tech for Absolute Computer Options in Concord, said sometimes taking an extra few seconds to write out a recipient's name can save embarrassment later on. "Make sure to type in e-mail addresses manually instead of using groups," he cautioned. "And in replies, be careful. If an e-mail was forwarded to a bunch of people, you might be replying to all the people on the list."
Kate Zabriskie, a corporate trainer for Business Training Works, which runs seminars on e-mail etiquette, said some of the most common mistakes are allowing e-mail software to automatically fill in names, sometimes incorrectly; writing e-mails to bosses without proofreading them; and writing angry e-mails solely to vent, but including the person's name and accidentally sending them.
But even Zabriskie's clients are far from perfect. She recalled, "I got an e-mail from a client who congratulated me on a child I hadn't had yet!"
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