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The Offbeat E-Mail Horror Stories

From termites bringing down data centers to fat jokes highlighting bad pharmaceutical company practices, unlikely and likely traps and problems involving e-mail are everywhere. We'd like to hear your stories.

Radicati finds that 12% of employees say they've shared music files with their corporate e-mail. That 70% say they've received offensive e-mail. That 62% send business e-mail from a personal account. And that 50% of people either don't know if or say their companies don't publish e-mail policies anywhere. Those numbers aren't promising, and they can lead to all sorts of e-mail pitfalls that simply feed the e-mail beast.

All sorts of things can manifest themselves negatively if e-mail isn't handled properly. In one case, the IT shop at a financial services customer of e-mail management company Clearwell received a call from someone in corporate who said, "We have this employee, we gave him a sabbatical, and he never came back." To figure out what went wrong, that company scoured e-mails to find out what happened to the guy. Long story short, the employee ended up being fired for "job abandonment," all because he couldn't keep his intentions out of an e-mail. I guess the lesson to that one is not to expect confidentiality from work e-mail. Oh, and also, don't fly the coop and expect to keep your job.

We're making a list of ways e-mail can go wrong and looking for offbeat, unique, or interesting anecdotes and stories to highlight those problems, complete with a little about how to fix 'em. Got any good ones?

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