Monday, January 28th, 2008

Regret sending out that email?

Are the following scenarios familiar to you?

• Feeling angsty with a colleague, you immediately replied a rude email with equally hostile wordings
• A private joke that was supposed to be .. private until the “To” includes the butt of the joke
• Reply all conveniently and include the whole school community, and conveniently making yourself look stupid
• Emailing to your wife love letters that are well-too-loving-for-any-eyes that was NOT supposed to be for your wife.

I did discuss about email etiquettes and a way to handle this. I now actively advocate that one should try deferring emails by 1 minute. Of course, you can set to 5 minutes delay if you want. 1 minute is a “just nice” reaction time buffer for me to realise any mistakes, or any further details I would like to further add on to the email, and the bare minimum delay I can tolerate for sending emails.

One way you can do this in Outlook using the Rules and Alert method, like in the following.

Another method I formerly employ is in activating “Spell Check Before Sending”, though it really is “Are you sure you wanna send this”. This provides a brute force reminder, and again, if you use Outlook, you can change it under Tools->Options->Spelling in the following manner, and check the 2nd box.

There you go, 1 way to go back in time, and another way to ensure you live on in your time. (: Of course, a last ditch resort is to revoke that email, by going to the “Sent” folder, then under your toolbar choose “Action->Recall message”. However, this is normally an ineffective measure as the recipients often are able to still access the message content.