I received a note from someone today, in reaction to my Tech Republic article on avoiding e-mail blunders http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/helpdesk/?p=56.
This person had received, from someone he knew, a note in error. The sender did not mean to send it to this person, but rather to someone with whom the sender was having an affair. The person who e-mailed me wondered if he should have let the sender know, then concluded he probably shouldn't, because of the resulting embarrassment.
I don't know how to answer this person, so I'd like to get your comments. From my perspective, I see two issues:
- addressing and sending too quickly
The person mentioned in the email probably didn't check the address field. If they have predictive fill-in, it's easy to send a message to the wronge person.
- relying on e-mail in the first place
Putting such intimate thoughts in an e-mail is questionable by itself. One doesn't know if the note will be forwarded, and in addition, the contents of e-mail are generally open for being read by others. Rather than putting dangerous or sensitive thoughts in e-mail (and I'm not advocating that you have an affair), think about simply asking the other person to call.
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2 comments:
Who was it that said, "never write when you can speak, never speak when you can nod, never nod when you can wink..."?
Absolutely the recipient should delete the mail and say nothing. E-mail is trivially easy to forge and there's no guarentee that the e-mail was in fact, legitimate. The only way to verify if the mail was sent from the real sender would be to involve the e-mail server administrator, and if it turns out the mail was not a forgery, and HR got involved, it could spiral out of control really quick.
I don't condone affairs, but the proper way to handle this is if you know a coworker is having an affair and you feel compelled to speak out, write an anonymous note and give it to HR and let them deal with it.
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