How Not to Email Naked Photos to Everyone You Know
Email can be a magnet for errors. Sometimes these errors are trivial: you add an extra letter to the proper name somewhere in the message; you accidentally missed part of a word; you are using semicolon instead of comma. All excusable wrongs.
And sometimes you look at the bar that separates the justified from the absurd, and you think, “I can jump much higher than this.” On Monday, the Utah Bar Association sent out an email with a large topless photograph of a woman to every active state attorney. As CEO John Baldwin told The Salt Lake Tribune:
“We’re terrified. We will investigate how this happened. Our goal is to find out what happened and make sure that it never happens again. “
Here are some ideas.
Step one: incognito mode isn’t your only friend
This is monday. You have a backlog of work that you either completed or did not want to do. The office seems sparse. Are you tired. Maybe it’s time to spice up the day with some porn because you don’t have the fear, the corner office, or the laptop that you know the IT department doesn’t keep track of.
Obviously, your browser’s incognito mode will be Sam for your Frodo on your quest for adult entertainment. But it’s pretty obvious, and it still doesn’t stop you from accidentally making the world’s biggest copy-and-paste error if you mix a little bit of work with your pleasure from time to time.
You will need stronger protection to prevent this. If you are on Windows, try using the AutoHotkey app to assign new actions to the CTRL + C and CTRL + V commands. Of course, you will lose the ability to quickly copy and paste, which is incredibly useful in a business environment, but at least you will feel better knowing that you are less likely to add Bang Bus instead of business documents to your emails. If you like Apple, the macOS keyboard customization app Karabiner is a great alternative.
Or you can, you know, subtract your work to make sure there is no porn in it.
Step two: create a porn profile
Companies use separate accounts to keep track of different types of income and expenses; why not be able to use different accounts to track your … interests?
Setting up multiple user profiles in Chrome is easy (and to a lesser extent in Firefox ). Make sure you give each character an easily recognizable name and badge. You might even want to go a step further and add a folder to the bookmarks toolbar that distinguishes your personal profile very, very clearly from your work profile. Set up different home pages for each. (We recommend anything other than your favorite adult website.) Change the default font size in your porn browser. Give him a well-defined topic.
In short, do anything and everything so that you don’t accidentally get work done outside of business hours. This makes it much more difficult to accidentally mix them up.
Step three: give yourself time for a quick sanity check
If you’re dreading the day you’ll add a dominant to your daily email reports, you can at least give yourself a little time to review every email you send to the world.
If you are using Microsoft Outlook, you can add a quick rule to all outbound email that prevents it from being sent within a specified period of time. This is useful for those “shit” moments, which can include realizing that you sent your email to the wrong person, remembering that you forgot to attach an important file you mentioned, or triple checking that you didn’t insert a huge image of a naked person in an email addressed to thousands of people.
Gmail’s undo send feature is simple, but you only have 30 seconds to undo all the emails you send. If you are using Apple Mail, the Mailbutler plugin allows you to both cancel the emails you send and schedule emails to be sent at a later time – useful if you want to give yourself a little more time for any last second checks. …
Step four: just don’t do it
You just could n’t watch porn on your work computer. While you’re at work. Working.