In an age where millions of emails are sent every day it is hard to find someone who hasn’t made a mistake when sending a message.

If you are using Microsoft Outlook and Exchange, you can quickly recall a message and delete unread copies, if you are lucky that is and no one has opened the email. If someone has already opened your errant message, then it’s too late.

Companies have become a bit more cognizant that some employees are just a bit too quick to pull the Send trigger on their mail. To compensate, many have put into place a time delay that gives someone the opportunity to think twice about a message that was sent out and stop it before it is delivered.

Just recently, the New York Times suffered a rather embarrassing incident where they had planned to send a few hundred emails out to some of their subscribers offering them a discounted rate if they did not cancel their subscription. Instead the message went out to over 8 million people.

That was mistake number one.

This was then followed up by a message that read:

“If you received an email today about canceling your NYT subscription, ignore it. It’s not from us”

sent out via Twitter. So they were blaming the mistake on someone else, a spammer perhaps.

But, as it was later discovered, the Times was the guilty party. They did send the initial message and then pawned off the responsibility.

Where the mistake hurt

This gaffe wound up costing the Times. Not only was their reputation hurt, but so was their bank account.

Since a discounted rate was promised to the few hundred who were thinking of cancelling their subscription to the Times, other customers felt slighted. Their loyalty, so it seemed, accounted for little reward.

To make up for it, the Times extended the discount to everyone who received the errant email, but only for part of a day. By the afternoon of their offer, they had put a halt to the discounted rates. This decision then led to a Twitter account called @NYTSpam that made fun of the error fully disclosing that it was a:

“Parody account. Not affiliated with @NYTimes or actual spammers — just sick of bad digital strategy.”

The account currently has over 200 followers.

The Times is not alone when it comes to paying the price for a bad email going public. These things actually happen all the time. But when it happens to a small business, we don’t really hear about it.

To keep the lid on scandals and humiliation that can be suffered due to email, it is important that you cover certain things with your employees.

Anyone who emails on behalf of the company should understand the following:

1. Never send an email when you are angry or emotional. This leads to things being said that you may want to take back.
2. Write, edit, send. Never type out an email and hit the send button without reading it over. Not only for spelling and grammar errors that could hurt your reputation, but also for the tone of the email. People read into things and if the tone is not what you intend it could lead to problems later.
3. Check your list. This ties in directly to the Times situation. Make sure that you are sending your email message to the right people. This becomes more important with so many organizations automatically populating the TO and CC fields as you type names. Make sure that you don’t rely simply on the names suggested to you. Be careful using the Reply to All as well.
4. Never punish or praise in an email message. Not only can the content of an email be misconstrued because of a lack of emotion, but it can also become evidence or public record. If you fail to follow human resources procedures, email can be a pretty solid form of documentation.
5. Don’t share company secrets via email. Whether they be financial, trade or even personal secrets they should never be relayed through an email message. It is far too easy for someone to accidentally, or purposefully, forward that message on to others.