Posted by February LPMT Tech Tip
Headline after headline after headline reveal attorneys suffering disaster because of mis-sending email. While slowing down and paying more attention can help, turning off some of the convenience features built into email applications can’t hurt. In MS Outlook (2010 & 2013) go to File – Options – Mail – Send Messages and uncheck “Use Auto-Complete List to Suggest Names when Typing in the To, CC, and BCC Lines”.
Then click on “Empty Auto Complete List”.
If that seems a bit too nuclear you can selectively remove old or easy to abuse AutoComplete email addresses that appear in email by clicking on the X next to the name that appears. This will clear it from your auto-complete list.
If you use keyboard shortcuts like <Cntrl + Enter> to send an email you can turn it off. Why? Because this method is so quick that it can be dangerous! You can turn off that shortcut by unchecking the option box, which appears in the same options menu as turning off AutoComplete. Now you won’t be able to create a disaster in the blink of an eye.
For Gmail you must delete individual contacts for them not to show up in AutoComplete, though you can go to Settings and choose to add contacts youself instead of the default “When I send a message to a new person, add them to Other Contacts so that I can auto-complete to them next time”.
There are other remedies for common mistakes like the “Reply All” monitor from Sperry for MS Outlook or Google’s “Undo” option in Labs (which can also be done in MS Outlook and is actually just putting a short delay on the “send” time). However, the main way to having embarrassing, costly or worse things happen from misuse of email is just to slow down on the send button.