The Wrong Dave

We’ve all done it - a little too quick on the ’send’ button and email has gone to the wrong person. Email systems are just trying to be helpful when they predict which email address you want based on the first few letters.. ‘d’, ‘a’, ‘v’, {return} and you inadvertently have selected the incorrect recipient. Usually it doesn’t matter but in a case this week it did. The consequences are, in this case, not too great - but imagine it was health information, or credit card details. There is technology out there (and yes Symantec has some), which looks at the content of email and can prevent them going outside the organization - or rather can check if that is what you really meant to do.

Content based classification and automated policy management is available today and can solve the problem of ‘the wrong Dave’.

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3 Responses to “The Wrong Dave”

  1. Geert Van der Eelst on May 25th, 2008

    Good point Dave. I think everyone has had this problem at one time or another. Our last case was not dramatic, but really rather embarrassing. so we have instituted a policy to switch off the automatic email address feature. Surprisingly, that is actually more reasonable than it may seem, in terms of typing in addresses. Geert

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