Google have just implemented a new featu
re on their gmail service called “Got the Wrong Bob?” which might just help to save you from the embarrassment of sending an email to the wrong person.
Surely just about everyone will have experienced at some point that awful sinking feeling you get when you realise that you’ve just sent an email to someone that was actually intended for someone else.
It’s even worse if you happen to be talking about that other person in the email. Imagine insulting your boss in a mail to your colleagues but then sending the email to your boss too. Makes you cringe doesn’t it?
Got the Wrong Bob is the brainchild of Software Engineer Yossi Mathias. What the software does is analyse the addresses and try to identify if you’ve accidentally included the wrong person.
“If you normally email Bob Smith together with Tim and Angela, but this time you added Bob Jones instead, we’ll warn you that it might be a mistake” it says on the Google blog.
It only works when you’re sending an email to more than one person at once though. You can still make those embarrassing blunders if you’re only emailing one person.
Anyone who uses email will know how easy it is to include the wrong name if there’s an auto complete function on the email address line, and more often than not there is.
You know the scene, you start typing the first few letters of someone’s name in the “To” line of the email and the rest of the email address is automatically completed for you.
Fine, highly convenient actually, the only problem is, if you’re not paying attention you could easily send an email to someone by mistake.
“I often came across these messages by mistake because Yossi is a common name in Israel, which is where I come from” Mathias told The Times newspaper.
“One was a communication between two people. They were having a conversation about the future of a colleague but had included him in the e-mails.
“So I thought that maybe we can provide a feature that can recognise this.”
According to the Times, one female video producer from Brighton sent an email to a colleague telling them that she was “throwing a sickie” to go to Wimbledon but accidentally sent the email to the entire office.
The response to the new service has been “overwhelming” said Matias, “People are saying that it is useful. It seems that almost everyone has their own personal scars when it comes to sending e-mails to the wrong Bob.”
Wish there was something like that for text messages too!
