back to article IPO spews email addresses to hundreds of recipients. Twice

The department entrusted with the protection of corporate data is seemingly somewhat less bothered when it comes to guarding personal info. The Intellectual Property Office yesterday made the classic schoolboy error of sending out an email containing hundreds of recipients in the 'to' field. Realising its blunder minutes …

  1. Olius

    Bit of an assumption on the cause

    "

    "It does beg the question why a government department is relying on someone to manually send out e-mails like this from their mail client rather than using a proper CRM/mailer daemon," noted one Reg reader who was included in the gaffe."

    "

    I've worked for plenty of companies who are set up with Mailchimp or similar, or in-house ways of sending bulk email etc, and they STILL manage to do this at some point - usually when the person who would usually send out the mail goes on holiday and some numpty thinks "Oh, I can handle this, easy..."

    I'm not excusing it, mind - my face is fully in my palm, as it is every time I see this happen...

  2. handle

    Why oh why...

    ...can't email clients pop up an "are you sure?" if you try to send something with more than a few addresses in To: and Cc:?

    1. Pascal

      Re: Why oh why...

      Because the user would then simply click yes and think "of course I'm sure, what a stupid question".

      After all, they're the one that pasted 100 addresses in "to:" in the first place. That's what they wanted to do.

      1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

        Re: Why oh why...

        Amend the the message to "You are about to send $NUMBER people each other's email addresses. Many of them won't want to have their address given away like this. Some of them will object very seriously and may sue your company. At the very least you will look stupid. You may get fired. Do you want to have your comany sued, look stupid and maybe lose your job?"

        Yes.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Why oh why...

      An even better solution...

      Implement a rule on the outbound mail server. If there are external recipients in the To or Cc field at more than X (maybe 3 would do for most organisations?) unique domains, bounce the mail. It's either a marketing mail that should be sent in an appropriate manner, or it's a mail targeting too many people, so it will likely be ineffective.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Why oh why...

        I'm sure Sophos Email Appliance supports this. .. doesn't stop some idiot in accounts sending an invoice to the wrong customer with different pricing though doh! Not a good day :/

      2. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

        Re: Why oh why...

        "a marketing mail that should be sent in an appropriate manner"

        To /dev/null

      3. David Roberts

        Re: Why oh why...an even better solution

        What happens then when you have a group of (say) 12 people who want to be able to use the "reply all" option?

        1. Richard 12 Silver badge

          Re: Why oh why...an even better solution

          To 12 different companies?

          How many external recipients at different domains would you be doing that with?

          In some cases there might be multiple consultancy firms with overlapping responsibilities, though that usually indicates a project that is going to fail anyway.

  3. Mark 85

    "we've taken appropriate steps to ensure this doesn't happen again."

    Define "appropriate steps". Did they change the way they do emails? Did they fire the poor minion who screwed up? Did some manager lose a few dollars on his/her bonus?

    I find this sort of statement belongs in the same bog with "we take security very seriously".

    1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

      Re: "we've taken appropriate steps to ensure this doesn't happen again."

      'Define "appropriate steps".'

      "We'll get it right on the second attempt in future."

  4. Mr Dogshit

    Did they dob themselves into themselves though?

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