Sending the wrong email message (thanks, AutoComplete)

Admit it. At some point, you have sent an e-mail to the wrong recipient. You sent a copy of an order to Joe Rosencrantz rather than Joe Guildenstern. Another gotcha!, courtesy of AutoComplete.

Jennifer J. Rose (sorry, only e. e. cummings gets all lower case from me), over at the ABA’s GP|Solo division, has written an informative and amusing Technology eReport column on that embarrassing problem. Jennifer points out that anyone it hasn’t yet happened to is simply living on borrowed time.

For those with a patience deficiency, the meat of the article is a few paragraphs down:

No autocomplete for you. You used it, and it abused you. Give it up. All the careful keyboarding in the world won’t save you from its dangers. Jim Calloway, Oklahoma State Bar Association Practice Management Advisor, describes how to disable autocomplete in Outlook at http://jimcalloway.typepad.com/lawpracticetips/2006/06/fun_with_outlook.html. In Eudora, it’s as simple as Tools | Options | Auto-completion.

Yep, if your fingers are the least bit slippery, then, sooner or later, AutoComplete will embarrass you — assuming it hasn’t done so already.

Surviving Email: Sending the Wrong Message