Everyone is guilty of it in one way or another, either you hit send on an email before editing it or you realize you sent your email to the wrong person. While these slip-ups are not necessarily earth shattering and can be easily rectified with a simple apology email, what about those other, more important emails which can’t be fixed by apologizing? Since you don’t know when such a mistake is going to occur, let the following post by Portfolio.com provide the wake-up call to get in the habit of checking your email twice before hitting the “Send” button. TechnoEsq also provides a tutorial at the end of this article to provide users of Outlook time to “fix” an email once it has already been sent. It’s not recalling an email, but it’s as close as you can get.
When the New York Times broke the story last week that Eli Lilly & Co. was in confidential settlement talks with the government, angry calls flew behind the scenes as the drug giant’s executives accused federal officials of leaking the information.
As the company’s lawyers began turning over rocks closer to home, however, they discovered what could be called A Nightmare on Email Street, a pharmaceutical consultant told Portfolio.com. One of its outside lawyers at Philadelphia-based Pepper Hamilton had mistakenly emailed confidential information on the talks to Times reporter Alex Berenson instead of Bradford Berenson, her co-counsel at Sidley Austin.
With the negotiations over alleged marketing improprieties reaching a mind-boggling sum of $1 billion, Eli Lilly had every reason to want to keep the talks under wraps. It was paying the two fancy law firms a small fortune to negotiate deftly and quietly.
If and when it did settle the allegations that it had improperly marketed its most profitable drug, Zyprexa, for schizophrenia, it would certainly want to announce the news on terms carefully negotiated with the government.
“We usually try to brace for that [kind of] story,” a Lilly staffer said.
So when the Times’ Berenson began calling around for comment, and seemed to possess remarkably detailed inside information about the negotiations, Lilly executives were certain the source of the leak was the government.
As it turned out, one of Eli Lilly’s lawyers at Pepper Hamilton in Philadelphia wanted to email Sidley Austin’s Berenson, about the negotiations. But apparently, the name that popped up from her email correspondents was the wrong Berenson.
Alex Berenson logged on to find an internal “very comprehensive document” about the negotiations, the consultant said, and on January 30, Berenson’s article, “Lilly in Settlement Talks With U.S.” appeared on the Times’ website. A similar article followed the next day on the front page of the New York Times.
How do you explain THAT to a client with an emailed apology? There is no way to recall emails already sent to users outside of your own Exchance server, however there is a way to provide time to realize and prevent these types of mistakes. By delaying delivery of your emails for five minutes after hitting “Send”, a lot of mistakes of this nature can be avoided. The process is simple in Outlook.
Now when you send an email, your message will be held for the period of time you selected before being sent. If you realize there is a problem, you just click on the Outbox, select the message and correct the mistake. The delay period will reset once you’ve made your changes.
Obviously, this won’t fix all mistakes, especially those you are not aware of, however it will help avoid those moments of panic after hitting the “Send” button when you realize you’ve just asked the 500 people on your listserve if they want to cut out of the office early and play a round of golf.