How to prevent misdirected emails

What can your charity do to prevent misdirected emails?

Perhaps the most important thing your charity can do is highlight the problem of misdirected emails to staff. That’s to make sure that they understand the importance of paying attention to the email addresses that they enter and the files that they attach, and the consequences of making mistakes. In practical terms, this means staff need to check every email and attachment every time before they press “send”.

However, even the most conscientious people can and do make mistakes for a variety of reasons. 52% of people questioned by Tessian said that they tended to make mistakes when tired and, worryingly, 93% said that they were in fact tired at some point during a typical working week.

Below are some other steps to consider.

Taking control of autocomplete

Despite being intended to cut down on typos in emails (as well as making email address entry quicker and easier), the autocomplete feature of many email programs is a key cause of misdirected emails. Here are some things that staff can experiment with to reduce the likelihood of misdirected emails:

• Remove unwanted entries: One way to reduce autocomplete errors is to watch for inappropriate autocomplete suggestions that pop up, and then delete them so that they are no longer suggested for autocompletion. This can be useful if an email program frequently suggests the email address of someone that may only have been in correspondence once, but whose name is similar to someone who is in frequent email contact
• Temporarily disable autocomplete: Another way to reduce the autocomplete problem is to disable it when dealing with particularly sensitive or confidential information, and then re-enable it later
• Disable autocomplete permanently: A more radical approach is to disable the feature altogether – although there is the risk that this will introduce more typo errors than the number of autocomplete errors that are avoided

Add a send delay

A different tactic for reducing misdirected email errors is to add a delay between when a user presses “send” and when the email is actually sent by the program. In the meantime the email is held in an outbox, providing an opportunity for a user to check that they have not made any mistakes – especially if they realise after they send an email that they have made a terrible mistake.

Email checking software

Perhaps the most effective way of preventing email misdirection, but also the most expensive, it to use email checking software which is available from a number of vendors including Tessian and DocsCorp.

These programs work in a number of ways, but essentially they look at recipient email addresses and use a simple form of artificial intelligence to assess if messages are “high risk” and need to be checked before sending. For example, an email sent internally to a colleague is likely to be assessed as lower risk that one sent to an external company address or an address at a public provider such as Gmail. The programs also allow users to blacklist certain addresses so that warnings are always issued before email is sent to them.