The awful agony of the misdirected email

As far as I know there is no word in English for the act of writing an email to a friend to moan about a detested work colleague and sending it straight to the detested colleague instead of the friend.

“Idiocy” does not really cover it. “Haplessness” comes closer, as does the thought I always have whenever I hear of such an incident: that could easily have been me.

The misdirected email is one of the most disastrous office blunders, and also remarkably common.

Some 40 per cent of workers in the US and the UK recently emailed the wrong person, a poll revealed last year, and a surprising 20 per cent claimed to have lost their job as a result.

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Much has been written about what to do in the ghastly event of missending. Hit “undo send” if possible. Confess immediately if not. Apologise, profusely, to anyone you have defamed, disparaged or disgraced.

Far less attention has been paid to those on the receiving end of the error, which is a shame because it is clear that, in the featureless plains of the modern office, these responses are an intriguing test of character. I was reminded of this the other day when a friend showed me a gobsmacking series of emails she had just been mistakenly copied into.

They revealed one person in the chain believed her to be an inexperienced lightweight in her 20s. In fact she is a mid-30s professional who has worked very successfully in her field at home and abroad for close to 15 years.

I am not sure everyone in her place would have responded as graciously as she did. Instead of exposing the hapless error in a way that put the sender’s job in jeopardy she wrote back to correct the record and make it clear no serious harm had been done.

This must have been a relief for the sender, who had fallen into a trap I have only narrowly avoided myself. She typed out the name of my friend in the “send” field to check its spelling, then failed to delete it.

Similar accidents happen because of the way computers automatically fill in the names of people they think you want to mail.

When I was the Financial Times’ aerospace correspondent it took considerable effort not to email the Emirates airline boss Tim Clark every time I dropped a line to my younger brother Tim.

The missent email can of course be a far more serious menace. I’ve always wanted to know what it is about the workings of the human brain that lead so many people to mistakenly send offensive messages to the person they find offensive.

Take Australia’s opposition leader Peter Dutton. In 2016, when he was immigration minister, he went to text a colleague to complain about a “mad f**king witch” of a woman newspaper political editor and immediately sent it to the editor herself.

I don’t suppose Dutton knows why this happened but again, the recipient’s response was admirable. She quickly texted Dutton back to say: “You know, mate, you’ve sent that mad witch text to the mad witch.”

It could have been much worse. She could have been Dutton’s boss.

I once worked at a Sydney newspaper where the editor, John Lyons, was sitting at his computer one day when a message from a reporter flashed across his screen. It said words to the effect of: “God, Lyons has got no idea.”

What’s he done now, Lyons typed back.

You won’t believe it, came the reply.

Tell me, he said. A flurry of irate messages spilled forth from the hapless reporter until finally, after one particularly granular description of his inadequacies, Lyons said that actually when he thought about it he found Lyons to be exceedingly considerate and fair-minded.

There was a long silence from the luckless messenger as realisation dawned. Then she typed: oh god.

She kept her job. In fact she outlasted Lyons, who told the story at his farewell from the paper. I remember laughing so hard I thought I might break a rib. The lesson is clear. If you are going to missend an email you must hope it goes to someone with a thick skin, a good soul or an excellent sense of humour. – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2023