People share the worst email mistakes they've ever made. Some are pretty brutal.
By Robin ZlotnickOct. 8 2024, Updated 2:01 p.m. ET
You type out an email. You read it over. It looks good. You hit send, and then a second later, you see a massive, embarrassing mistake. But it's too late. It's out there. And now you have to live with the consequences. It's happened to the best of us. We're all bound to make an email mistake one time or another.
One person recently shared a hilariously embarrassing story of an email exchange gone wrong, and it went totally viral. Soon, hundreds of others followed suit and shared similarly mortifying times they completely whiffed it over email. I'm not going to lie; some of these made me laugh very, very hard.
Typos happen all the time in emails, so if I see anything misspelled, even my name, I almost always let it go. I'm so glad I've never found myself in this situation.
And if I was on the other side of things, if someone corrected me on their name and I noticed they'd misspelled it, I don't know I would have the courage to say, "Yo, check your first email, ya big idiot." This is just a whirlwind of embarrassment. Luckily, many chimed in to show MauRice that he is not alone in being humiliated over email mistakes.
It's got to be difficult to get your name wrong in email. I can't tell you how many times I've accidentally typed "Tobin" when my name is "Robin." It doesn't help that Tobin is actually a name. While I usually catch myself, I'm sure there have been a couple of instances where I've missed it.
This is a good thing to know ahead of time if you have a YouTube account. I really hope when the meeting started, they were like, "Shall we call you 'Millennial Avocado'? Or do you prefer 'Unicorn Kween'? Just let us know."
Sometimes, email errors aren't about getting your own name wrong. People make all sorts of regrettable mistakes in the messages they send to other people. You may end up looking at these through your fingers like you're watching a horror movies because they're that cringe-worthy.
I don't know about you, but if I was writing an email in a language that was not my native one, no matter how confident I was that I knew the language, I would have someone who really knew the language read it over and over...and over again to make sure I didn't accidentally make a typo that turned my very innocent sign off into something wholly inappropriate.
OK, so I actually kind of love this. I think she should lean into it and continue signing off with, "BEAST." It could be the thing that defines her "brand," you know?
I've never been to Nando's chicken because it's in the UK, but I've heard tale of its deliciousness, so I can't help but think that if I was one of the 2,200 people who received this email, sure, I would initially be confused, but then I would get it. If I'd sent that, though, I'd be humiliated. Because you can't just leave it! You have to follow it up with, "Um, sorry all, just really excited about some chicken."
This one did kind of make me want to crawl under a rock. For three years that typo was in her email signature! And she worked at a library! This is like that time I sent my writer's bio out to bunch of places while it said "Robin writer" instead of "Robin is a writer." So embarrassing.
Raise your hand if you've ever done this. I definitely have. I don't know if I've forgotten the attachment three times, but I've definitely done it twice. I'm so glad now Gmail is smart enough to ask you if you want to send an email without an attachment when you have the word "attached" in the body of the email. It's saved me so many embarrassing follow-ups.
This is incredible. A perfect typo. The fact that she sent 30 letters to "Madman" probably didn't make her very happy, but it makes me ecstatic. This is my favorite email error on the list by far.
This day in age, where we have super-smart Gmail and Grammarly, you'd think it would be easy to make sure your emails are typo-free before sending them. But what can we say? We're human, and humans make mistakes. Lots of them. All the time. We're creatures of error. And that's what makes us beautiful.
This article was originally published on February 3, 2020. It has since been updated.