Digital Life: Help for emails you meant not to send

Paste BN columnist Steven Petrow offers advice about digital etiquette.

Q: Last week I forwarded an email to a colleague, realizing seconds later that the long thread that followed my note contained a string of not-so-kind remarks about her looks, weight, and other personal issues. It was horrible and I was mortified after I saw what that thread contained. But it was all done so quickly. When I didn’t hear back from her I called, but my messages kept going into her voicemail. What else can I do?

-- Anonymous

A: Well, for this situation there is only damage control, but the tech gods at Google have a solution to prevent it from happening again. Before you do anything else, set up your Gmail account to build in a delay before your messages go out — this allows you to cancel or take back an email for up to 30 seconds after you hit “send.” That’s fantastic news for anyone who’s ever realized too late what was in a sent email, which is just about everyone.

To do this, go into your settings (click on the gear icon at top right), and scroll down to check “enable undo send,” where you can specify a 5, 10, 20, or 30-second delay. For those of you who use Microsoft Outlook, there’s also hope. You can use Rules to delay the sending of an individual email — or all of your emails — from 1 to 120 minutes. All good news for you, to save you from yourself the next time your slippery fingers get ahead of you.

But let me not miss the opportunity to wag my finger at you (and everyone else, including me, who’s found themselves in a similarly awkward situation, whether at work or among family and friends). I’ve learned to follow the “newspaper rule” — meaning that if you’d be embarrassed to see it in the newspaper, don’t put it in your email. That includes, of course, those comments about your colleague’s looks, weight, and personal issues, which as I’m sure you know didn’t belong in an email at all. It also covers messages from other people that might be in a forwarded thread. As a rule, when you forward an email, or add a new recipient to a thread, you should delete everything below your own message unless it is absolutely necessary to include.

But if — no, make that when — you do make a bad goof, the best thing to do is forgo email and either pick up the phone or, when possible, make an office or cube visit. Take responsibility for your error and apologize, using the words: “I am sorry.” Don’t rely on the blame-dodging version that politicians use: “Mistakes were made.” Your colleague may be letting your calls go to voicemail for now, but it’s up to you to seek her out and make amends.

Agree of disagree with my advice? Let me know in the comments section.

Submit your question to Steven at stevenpetrow@earthlink.net. You can also follow Steven on Twitter: @StevenPetrow. Or like him on Facebook at facebook.com/stevenpetrow.