Getting the recipient right

Topics/tags: Rants, email, short

Today I received a message that was something like the following.

From: "Some Person via DocuSign" <dse@eumail.docusign.net>  
Date: August 16, 2018 at 5:01:25 AM CDT  
Subject: Please DocuSign: Chapter Accommodation Licence  
Reply-To: Some Person <some.person@site.com>

I did not know what a Chapter Accommodation License was. I did not know of any contracts that I needed to sign. And it was from another country. I assume my inclination was the same as yours: It’s a phishing message. This kind of message is a typical approach to phishing. Thank you for your order. Please sign the contract. My normal inclination is to trash such messages [1].

But something in the back of my head told me to review the message. And it’s good that I did. It turns out that while the message was not intended for me, it was intended for a member of my family. That’s a problem. I understand the occasional misdirected email message. But people who need signatures should spend extra care in getting it right. We’ve also had a similar problem before and the issue was supposed to have been resolved. In April. I’m unhappy, to say the least.

Now I’m just crossing my fingers that I didn’t delete any other important electronic mail messages that were intended for another member of my family.

[1] That’s not quite true. My normal inclination is to forward them to our security team so that they can be on the lookout for similar messages.

Version 1.0 of 2018-08-16.