What’s the right thing to do when you receive an email that clearly wasn’t meant for you?
It can be a frustrating and sometimes embarrassing scenario when you inadvertently copy someone on an email by accident. Perhaps you were looking up the person’s email address by clicking on the “to” field in your email so you could forward the address onto the intended recipient. You had no intention of sending the email itself to the person whose address you looked up, but things happen. You get distracted. You forget you’d looked it up and autofill provided the answer. And boom, the email is sent.
It's also not unheard of to compose an email to a group of people but find that autofill provides you with the email address for someone with the same first name as one of the people on your group list rather than the person you really wanted to send your email to. You get distracted. You forget to double-check to make sure the right people are on your email routing list. And boom, the email is sent.
In the case of the former, where you inadvertently copy someone on an email that wasn’t intended for them, a simple apology would be in order if you catch your error. Ideally, your truly intended recipients will fight the temptation to hit “reply all” to your initial email and spare the unintended recipient’s inbox. While it might seem odd to send an apology for sending an unintended note and thus furthering the cluttering of unwanted emails, go with the simple apology and move on.
When you receive an email from someone you know that includes you on a group email list that she clearly didn’t intend for you to be on, the temptation might be to simply ignore the errant email. It wasn’t intended for you and it wasn’t your mistake. But whoever it was who might have been the intended recipient won’t get that initial email. Sure, the group might figure out after a while that this fellow with whom your email address was swapped out wasn’t on the initial email thread. But by then, there might be a lot of catching up to do and more work created to do so. Again, not your mistake. It’s not like doing nothing is going to cause any more work for you.
Nevertheless, the right thing would be to send a reply to the initial sender – not the whole group on the email recipient list – and alert her that you were likely sent the email in error. Fight any urge to say nothing in a prurient effort to see if you can learn some juicy secrets you weren’t intended to receive. While the sender might be a bit embarrassed at hearing from you, the right thing would be for her to thank you. Then she should figure out how to bring the guy for whom the email actually was intended up to speed.
All of us would do wise to slow down just a tad, take a deep breath and double-check our emails before we send them off. The time we save from having to deal with errant emails will more than make up for the few seconds it takes to check twice before sending.
Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice, is a senior lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues.
Do you have ethical questions that you need to have answered? Send them to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com.
Follow him on Twitter @jseglin.
(c) 2025 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.
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