Somewhat related, but Mary in this email chain story is a good friend of mine. She had everything from the Wall Street Journal to Playboy calling her up.

http://www.snopes.com/love/dating/newlow.asp

Somewhat related, I once had a email I wrote cross packets with another email chain. Meaning an email I sent to a friend ended up being added onto an email chain going to another group. I only knew because one of my managers came by my office to ask why I was responding to that chain (I signed my name which is not common, but the email looked like it originated from someone else).

It was a semi-snarky email. I called the person whose email it crossed paths with (recipients thought it was from her) to suggest she retract the email and she refused because she did not understand what happened and everything looked fine from her end. She apparently took some crap from people that did not understand what happened about making jokes about a serious topic. I never got in any trouble but I am VERY careful about what I put in an email.

No one lost their job.

Recently someone at my company did a reply all that included the f word AND the n word. He thought he was sending it just to his buddy. I don't know what happened, but I've been wondering if he'll get fired. We're currently going through a reorganization with some layoffs.

What if the content wasn't inane? But not totally serious either?

I work in a huge organization - 10K+ - employees and it happens on occasion where someone will send an email to a distribution list that has a few thousands names. Nothing happens. It's just a mistake.

Anonymous wrote:Only been on the receiving end of them. I laugh and feel bad for the people. My favorite was the guy who hit reply all (entire firm) with a health fair question. He wanted to know how long the teeth whitening would take. You could hear the laughs as everyone opened the e-mail.

He is still employed.

Tee hee.

We always have older managers who seem to not be paying attention while on blackberry who will reply all to mundane work requests sent to everyone at the firm -- returning forms; saying ok to a request etc. I have never seen anything terrible happen at my firm with reply-all. I am careful not to snark on work email and if I must, I don't hit reply and then take off the unintended recipients -- too much room for error. Usually I will hit forward and type the name of the person who I want to get this so I can say whatever I want. Given that I'm paranoid about emails being searched/pulled, sometimes I won't even do that and I'll just send a new blank email to the person I'm chatting with saying something general like "do you believe that person . . . ." So if IT was spot checking emails quickly, they wouldn't know what I was talking about without having to check a few other emails first.

I had a coworker who did this for everything including personal health stuff like diarrhea and leaving early. He would always send it to everyone even after he was told we all were getting his emails.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I never did, but a guy I knew did:

http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2003/06/30/030630ta_talk_mcgrath

The famous Jonas Blank. I was at another firm and that email arrived within minutes.

Nice I went to high school with him--he's a good guy. There's even a snopes page for him.

Anonymous wrote:I never did, but a guy I knew did:

http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2003/06/30/030630ta_talk_mcgrath

The famous Jonas Blank. I was at another firm and that email arrived within minutes.

I never did, but a guy I knew did:

http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2003/06/30/030630ta_talk_mcgrath

I was at home and emailed a coworker to see if she wanted some extra concert tickets I had. She couldn't use them and promptly forwarded to entire company.

And let's just say it was a show that I didn't exactly want the entire company to know I was attending (and was excited to have upgraded to front row).

That was fun. Pure mortification.

Only been on the receiving end of them. I laugh and feel bad for the people. My favorite was the guy who hit reply all (entire firm) with a health fair question. He wanted to know how long the teeth whitening would take. You could hear the laughs as everyone opened the e-mail.

He is still employed.

Yes, it was meaningless; work-related. Followed up with an apology/explanation. That's why I keep all my work emails professional. At least dish on what you said OP.

Have you mistankenly sent an email meant for a select few to the whole company? What was the reaction? How bad was it?