Tech Tips: Email Accidents

We have seen an increase in email accidents recently with unintentional sharing of sensitive and personal information to global email lists.

BEFORE you hit send, use this 5-second checklist:

• Do you really want to reply to all? 

  • Check your recipients and only send to those who need to receive it.

    • If you need a response from a person, put them in the “To” box.

    • If you don’t need a response but they need the info, put them in the “CC” box.

    • If you must send to a large group, use “BCC” to prevent a “Reply All” mistake (like I’ve done with Tech Tuesday).

• Do you have sensitive or personal data in your email?

  • Is it absolutely necessary? 

  • If any recipients are external to Duke, put “[SEND SECURE]” in the subject line.

• Check your attachments.  Do you need to send them or can you put them on the network and send a link?

  • Double-check for sensitive or personal data.  Only send to those who need to receive it.

  • Sending a link is a better way to share documents with a large group.

  • If you make a mistake, simply remove the file from the link.  Problem solved.

• Use Box for larger files.

• Does the subject line match the content of the email?

It only takes 5 seconds, but can significantly improve your email workflow.

Duke email - the basics

Your Duke email platform is Microsoft Office 365. It’s located in the cloud and provides unified email and calendaring. Your Duke mailbox size is 50GB.  Duke values your privacy – no one has access to your email except you. Your email is not stored long-term at Duke or on the cloud unless you decide to create your own archive. Although you can always get a recent backup of your email file if it becomes corrupt, this is generally only available for at most 30 days.

Your email when you leave Duke

Students

Duke graduates can use their NetIDs and Duke email for one year after graduation. After that year, the account will expire and all associated accounts, including e-mail addresses, mailboxes, e-mail forwarding and personal file storage space will be deleted. If you are a former Duke employee, your DHE/NETID account will expire after graduation.

Faculty & Staff

When you leave Duke, your email file is deleted. There is no option for keeping your email file open and/or forwarding your mail to your new position outside of Duke. If you and your supervisor agree, there is a process by which your supervisor can obtain a copy of your email file for business purposes. This requires a strong business case, plus approval from DUSON executive leadership, the Duke Health Information Security Office and Duke Health executive leadership.

What is message recall?

With message recall, a message that you sent is retrieved from the mailboxes of the recipients who haven’t yet opened it. This is helpful if you selected Reply All instead of Reply. Or, you may want to substitute a replacement message – for example, if you forgot to include an attachment or left out important details from your original email.

Message recall is possible, but rarely works the way you would like it to work. Follow our Tech Tip of the Day to make sure you don’t need to use it.

Mac Users

Mac users of Outlook do not have an option for recalling a message.

Windows Users

• Go to your Sent folder and open the email that you would like to recall

• In the Move tab, press Actions

• Select Recall this message from the Actions menu

• You have three options when recalling a message:

  • Delete unread copies of this message

  • Delete unread copies and replace with a new message

  • Tell me if recall succeeds or fails for each recipient

What happens when you recall a message?

Both the original email and the recall message are received in the recipient’s inbox.

• If the recipient opens the recall message first –

  • The original email is deleted

  • The recipient is informed that you (the sender) have deleted the message from their inbox

• If the recipient opens the original message first –

  • The recall fails

  • The recipient has both messages now (the original and the recall message)

Message recall does not work for Mailman distribution lists, such as our student lists.