Newton
December 28, 2016
6 min read
The value of email is very high, but with all this time within email sometimes mistakes can occur.
The majority of emailing now occurs on mobile devices with means more typos, more mistakes, more chances to mess up, especially with these smaller screens in our pockets. Within Newton Mail we know these mistakes can happen, so we included “undo send” a way to reverse a sent email — perfect for these situations.
But for some, this wasn’t an option and the consequences were sometimes scary. Here are some of the top emails disaster stories from around the world documented for your pleasure:
Top Secret emails leaked…
In 2000, UK schoolgirl from Devon, Claire McDonald minding her own business received 11 emails a day for 6 months from a top-secret source at the Pentagon in the US. She had accidentally been added to a round-robin recipient list by a navy commander.
The emails themselves contained intel and secrets about how the UK can retain its secrets from other parties. And other emails included detailed communication problems on British warships and others covering New Zealand’s naval defence strategy. Claire, 15 contacted the navy in December 2000 in an effort to flag these emails up, but her efforts were ignored. In total they sent 250 sensitive emails. An email disaster from the British navy.
35 pull-ups and a 3.93
In 2012, a NYU (New York University) student managed to include a mention in his cover letter. He was applying for an analyst job very late at night and his excerpt managed to include the following:
“I decided to redouble my effort by placing out of two classes, taking two honors classes, and holding two part-time jobs. That semester I achieved a 3.93, and in the same time I managed to bench double my bodyweight and do 35 pull-ups.”
The cover letter went viral around Wall Street. As a very humorous cover letter but also highlights that you have to check your attachments before sending over important emails.
“They don’t have the right”
Spirit Airlines are a low priced US based airline service. In 2007, two passengers contacted the team to complain about their experience, delayed flight and missed concert thanks to Spirit Airlines. Spirit Airline’s team offered to send the two customers vouchers worth $200.00 but the two individuals weren’t happy with this and the email was forwarded to the company’s CEO.
The CEO, Ben Baldanza didn’t quite think the two deserved the right to complain. And accidentally hit “Reply All” with the following message.
“Please respond, Pasquale, but we owe him nothing as far as I’m concerned. Let him tell the world how bad we are. He’s never flown us before anyway and will be back when we save him a penny.”
We bet he wished he had an undo send feature to avoid this email disaster.
Shall we have dinner?
Email mistakes can happen to the best of us. White House Staffer managed to make a mistake in preparation for the White House Seder Dinner. In 2009, a sleep deprived White House staffer sent an unedited draft of the schedule for the dinner. No top-secret information was included inside of this email, but some comments were made in the reply thread.
One of the staffers in the thread replied with “Can we removed the dinner at the end of the day?” — there was also remarks offering Obama some notes around what he should mention in the speech. The email went out to all press corps and did make the news due to the comments surrounding the email and the Dinner.
The staffer was not fired, and didn’t lose anything from this email being sent. A lucky get out of jail free card for the White House Staffer.
Cat emails, everywhere!
Fab, a home and life accessories brand, managed to make an email blunder in 2014. They sent out a test email containing solely an image of a cat.
The subject line contained “[TEST] PM Tracking Test”.
This was clearly a test that had gone wrong, but this went out to their 100,000s of customers. A few hours after Fab decided to follow-up with all of those customers with the best recovery to an email issue.
They sent a well-crafted email about their issue — including cat puns, more images of cats and a 10% discount that left almost everyone with a smile on your face and less annoyance. An innocent mistake with a fantastic ending.
For the marketing department this email disaster turned into a triumph within a matter of hours.
Read other great email recoveries.
#ReutersReplyAllGate
Thomas Reuters managed to make this list in 2015 with their famous #ReutersReplyAllGate. The reply all disaster came from an employee called Vince. Vince managed to send a reply all to almost all Reuters employees, totalling to around 33,000 inboxes.
The disaster came when some more employees managed to join the ongoing reply all war. For a few days, the reply alls continued to come in for all the 33,000 inboxes cc’d. A Reuters spokesperson told The Wall Street Journal that the email slowed during this time, but didn’t manage to collapse. A nightmare for the tech departments we can imagine.
Many Reuters employees managed to find the humorous side by tweeting out using #ReutersReplyAllGate to add to the humour of the company wide mistake.
Each one of us has been guilty of committing email blunders, harmless or otherwise. And this will continue to happen to everyone regardless of how cautious we are, because humans are prone to error. But even if you don’t and make that inadvertent email blunder (like sending ‘Retards’ instead of ‘Regards’), know that Newton has you covered. We hope you enjoyed these stories and are inspired to pay attention to emails even more.
Undo Send on Newton is a cross-platform functionality working across platforms. So where ever your mistake occurs you can resolve it with Undo Send. The feature also works on desktop devices and across all your mail accounts — Gmail, Exchange, IMAP, Yahoo, iCloud etc. Here’s how it works in practice?
It’s very easy to get started with Undo Send on any of your devices.
Want to try the Undo Send feature on Newton Mail?
Try the 14-day free trial here and get some peace of mind over your emails today.
If you are looking for a nice email app that works across iOS, Android and Mac, give Newton a spin!
