The Address Search Mishap

stock photo!
stock photo!

I have a problem and a solution.

Have you ever wanted to send someone a message with a friend or colleague’s e-mail address in the body text, and you typed that person’s name into the To or CC section of the e-mail before copying and pasting their contact info into the message? And then you forgot to delete their e-mail from the To or CC section, thereby including them on an e-mail you definitely didn’t want them to see?

I’m pretty sure we’ve all done it. I almost did it today (I was saying good things about someone, but still, there was a lot of confidential information in the message).

My solution involves Gmail Labs. For a while now, Google employees have been creating clever plugins to Gmail to make it work better. My favorite is the one that recognizes when you use the word “attachment” in the text of an e-mail that doesn’t have an attachment on it.

Well, I think the problem I mentioned today would be perfect for Gmail Labs. The plugin would look at the text of the message for e-mail addresses of people who are also CCed, and it would prompt you to approve the message before sending it. Considering the number of people who use Gmail, I bet this would save thousands of people from embarrassing themselves every day.

What do you think? Have you ever made this mistake?

2 thoughts on “The Address Search Mishap”

  1. That sounds like an easy & valuable solution for some people, but I’d want it to be something you could easily toggle on and off; one of my biggest computer pet peeves is anything that pops up and delays me from moving forward.

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