Work Email Help!

[noname84]

Hi,

 

I have made a schoolboy error and sent a work email to a stranger by mistake.

I was meant to send home to my partners email but mistyped and it sent to an incorrect one but I didn't know until I was home and checked my work phone as the email hadn't arrived. (I sent home to work on a report) So unable to recall.

The email does not contain sensitive or commercial data or MI, it does have some detail around what changes I would like to make, but No Names are mentioned.

Not sure what to do? Do I contact IT/ my line manager - will this just create a huge problem when it was a genuine mistake - the emails do all go out with the normal disclaimers at the bottom.

[Sidewinder]

If it were me, I would probably email the recipient again and apologise for the mistake, requesting that the email be deleted.

 

Would you have got into trouble for sending the email to home in any case? If not, then even if the recipient were to email the Postmaster and query the message, then it could easily be explained as a regrettable, but genuine mistake.

 

Personally I doubt that you will hear any more. Are you sure that it went to a deliverable address?

[san_d]

One thing to clarify here: email is never private but always public. The SMTP protocol doesn't have any protection built-in. This is not just a technical thing, it has legal implications: you can't request a message to be deleted from a mailbox.

 

Even that long legal disclaimer crap at the bottom of corporate emails make no sense whatsoever.

 

As a general rule of thumb sensitive or delicate information should never be sent by email. If there's no other way, the only alternative is to use asymmetric encryption with GPG/PGP:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Privacy_Guard