FOR the first time in years last week, I committed the cardinal electronic sin of foolishly sending an email response to the wrong person.

It’s easily done and goes like this – a) someone sends a complaint to your electronic post box; b) you open up said complaint and immediately pen a note above it to a colleague to respond on your behalf; c) you click the send button but forget to change the address – and instead of forwarding it on, you send it right back from whence it came.

This becomes a disaster if you have added in some catty comments about the person making the complaint. I wonder how many emailers have been sacked for this very easy error?

I receive around 1,000 emails a week, and answer most of them. To be efficient, I have to type fast, so I realised early on that mistakes are possible – and made a solemn vow never to write anything that would compromise me if it fell into the wrong hands.

In other words, I don’t bitch electronically.

I also apply the same rule to print pages. Lots of young journalists have been known to insert jokes into stories on the assumption they will be picked up by senior colleagues.

The trouble is that these ‘jokes’ then are missed and appear in the paper with awful consequences.

As a very young journalist several decades ago, I once added a silly but obviously bogus name to a councillor’s title in a report of a meeting. It was an in-joke between me and my boss and I waited for the laughter. It never came because he read over the joke, missed it and sent the page on its way to the press.

Luckily, I caught it before it got out of the building and managed to correct it, but knew I had come within a whisker of disaster. A while later, another young journalist I knew wasn’t so lucky. He penned a poor taste joke which made it into print, with terrible repercussions.

So when I arrived at the Bucks Free Press and Star in later years, I made it a special point to severely rebuke anyone who made any sort of joke on unfinished pages.

When we have an empty headline space, we simply put the words “Headline goes herey herey herey.”

The letter ‘y’ acts as a descender to show where the story should begin underneath, while the nonsensical nature means it’s unlikely to be confused for a real headline. And even if it ever did get into print, the worst we’d look is foolish.

Email is more dangerous than print because no one proof reads your letters and most people reply to dozens a day, so mistakes are so easy. Last week, I received an email complaint about an aspect of our coverage, and I immediately flicked it on to sports editor Alan Feldberg with an instruction to respond.

But a few minutes later, the original complainant wrote to say I had instead posted it back to him.

It was embarrassing, but happily there was nothing in my email that could be criticised.

The complainant even wrote back: ”It’s lucky you didn’t say ‘Alan, can you respond to this moaning **** please’.”

We shared a jokey interchange after that and the complainant told me in a later email: “A similar scenario is when you are making comments (eg criticisms) about another person, and have that person’s name in your head, and then send the e-mail to that person rather than who you meant to send it to... easily done, and has no doubt cost people their jobs.

“I think it would make a great TV programme… Emails I did not mean to send. The consequences are limitless, lost jobs, lost money, broken marriages.

Have you ever fallen victim to an email calamity? Email me (at your peril) at scohen@london.newsquest.

co.uk