Understand That You Have No Control Over Your Email Once It’s Been Sent

I’ve already covered a lot of the scary reasons why you need to understand the fact that you have no control over your email once it’s been sent, but this seems like a good time to gather up a bunch of them in one place. What kind of trouble can your email create after you hit the “Send” button and think that you’re done with it?:

It can be forwarded along in an endless chain to anyone in the Universe who has an email account. Some clever person can forward it to your boss, to your boss’s boss, to your boss’s boss’s boss. It can wind up in the hands of your ex-husband, your priest, or the girl who beat you in the 8th grade student body president election. It might be of interest to the Securities and Exchange Commission or amusing to any number of strangers who simply enjoy laughing at you.

Your message can be permanently posted someplace such as the blogs and websites where you can find copies of the angry associate’s goodbye message or the fight between the two secretaries over the makings of the ham sandwich. If you think that the fast-paced nature of the web means that these things disappear quickly, you’re wrong. Many websites are still available even when they’ve been shut down or altered. Still not convinced? Check out the Wayback Machine (www.archive.org), which keeps an archive of websites just the way they looked in the distant past-- 2001 for example. Go ahead and take a look at an old version of your company’s website. You’re bound to find something embarrassing there. Web design sure seems to age quickly!

Anyone with a copy of your email can edit it and forward it along to someone else as your original text. While there are methods intended to thwart this kind of tampering, it’s generally quite easy for someone to create a forgery out of your email if they are really determined to mess with you. Really, the best thing is to avoid making enemies in the first place. But if that’s already a forgone conclusion, try not to send those people anything that would tempt them to make a tiny little change that could make you look really, really bad. By the way, I don’t feel guilty about editing someone else’s message if I’m going to forward it along if doing so cleans up errors in the original message or removes sensitive information that other people don’t need to know. But it’s always a good idea to ask permission before forwarding anyone else’s message. You can never be completely sure what’s sensitive and what isn’t.