The Wonderful World of E-mail

Email has morphed into one of those things that, much like Blackberries for some people, we as a society are growing to become increasingly dependent upon. Back in the old days of the internet, email was intended to be an interoffice messaging service. It’s no secret that email is far from secure. In fact, many experts will tell you that sending an email is likened to sending a post card in the mail. Yet every day I will receive emails full of sensitive information, and/or including attached documents with personal information. As a general rule, I don’t send out emails with any sensitive information in it.

Anyways, back to the original intent for this blog. I’m not going to preach on email security, or ethics, or etiquette because we’d be here all night long. I have a hell of a time telling a short story as it is. This is just a story that happened to me that I found humorous. This isn’t a lesson teaching blog, just something to think about next time you fire off that next email. Here we go:

About a week ago I received a web seminar invitation via email. I’m not sure how many of you use Outlook as your primary email program, but for those who don’t, an invitation just lets you add certain events, or meetings to your calendar so you get a reminder when that day comes. It’s a decent feature, but I hardly ever use it. When you receive an invitation, you have the option of “accepting” the invitation, at which time the event will go in your calendar as mentioned. You can also reply and forward the invitation much like a regular email. In fact, this particular invitation was actually forwarded to me, as in I wasn’t part of the original email list that received these. The lady down the hall thought it might be something I would want to attend, so she forwarded it to me.

Now as much as I enjoy web seminars (about as much as I enjoy listening to Sean Hannity), this particular one applied to my department about as much as the migration habits of the humpback whale. I wanted to reply back to the lady (with whom I have a great working rapport) with a witty reply, but when I hit reply, I immediately noticed the original author’s email address in the TO: line. I canceled this out, and hit Forward, instead. I then typed in my reply which was something to the effect of “I’d love to attend this webinar, but I’ll be too busy counting the holes in the ceiling tiles”. I fired it off and waited for a reply. The reply never came, but I wasn’t too concerned.

Today, the lady that sent me the forwarded invitation stopped by my office and let me know that she just attended that webinar, and it was very informative. I said good. She then started laughing and said she had something to confess, but was a bit apprehensive about it. I told her to spill it. She said that when she read my reply, she sent me another reply saying something like “Haha, let me know how that goes”. Only later to realize that she hadn’t sent that reply to me, but rather the original author of the invitation. You see, when I hit reply, it wanted to reply to the original author too. Apparently, on invitations, no matter how many different people it has been forwarded to, it can only be replied to the original sender. She realized her mistake only after it was too late. Therefore the original guy is probably sitting there thinking “Damn, this guy would rather count the holes in ceiling tiles than watch my web seminar”. I just had to laugh. I told the lady that I didn’t mind since that was pretty mellow for one of my responses. Certainly it could have been a whole lot worse. It just got me thinking about the Reply All: nightmare stories I’ve heard of. Any of you ever do anything like that?