Email is a wonderful offshoot of the Internet. However, often it can be a headache and the source of severe embarrassment. Here are possibly the top 5 most annoying email mistakes:
1) Typos:
Having sent thousands of emails where I just quickly respond I probably have this problem on a daily basis. Even with the spell checks sometimes typos happen and with very embarrassing results. My brother actually had a very funny typo where the spell check worked against him. He had an important visitor coming to his university and he wrote saying that he was very excited to meet him. However, he typed too fast and didn’t hit the “m” in meet. So he wrote “eet” which the spell check fixed to say “eat”. So his message came out to say that he was very excited to eat him. I’m not sure how his university views cannibalism.
2) Clicking the “reply all” button
The dreaded “replay all” button though it has it’s uses it can source for major problems. The most annoying time for me was a spam cc-ed hundreds of people on a mailing list. As a result my inbox was overwhelmed by hundreds of requests from people wishing to be removed from the mailing list where these people used the “reply all” to respond. It took several days before the issue was resolved. I actually had to create an email filter to remove any emails from the list.
3) Opening Spam
Spammer’s can be brilliant in their ability to convince us that the email is not in fact spam. We open it expecting some nice letter from a friend and get instead an offer for larger breasts or Viagra. (Personally I’m quite happy with my breasts) The really annoying part is once you open the email the spammer knows that the email is valid so they will send even more spam to it.
4) Using the wrong email address to reply
This is more of a personal mistake that irritates me. I have hundreds of companies that I either own or work for. In the past I had to always make sure to send the email for the right company in order to avoid confusion. The management of my 600+ email addresses become a management nightmare so I gave up and started using a gmail address for everything. Probably not as professional but really reduced the headaches.
5) Send the email to the wrong person
Email software has greatly improved over the years but sometimes things that are supposed to make our lives easier end up backfiring. For example the auto complete feature when typing the email address it displays a full address of one of your contacts. It is a nice feature but has caused me grief. Once I was sending an invoice to a client where they just happen to have a very similar name as another client. So I ended up sending the invoice to the wrong client. The client was confused what the invoice was for. I quickly apologized and sent it to the correct client. Fortunately the client had made a similar mistake with me only a short time earlier and they totally understood.
Please comment and tell me your biggest email blunders 