"Send"...

Ugh.

I am still amazed at the chaos I created last night with the click of a button.

I was up late at night gathering and preparing things to send to our agent for our refinance. Bank statements, W2s, Paul's job contract, social security numbers, etc. etc. etc. Basically every financially personal piece of information.

I attached all the scans and documents to an email to send to Paul's email, typed "paul" into the "To:" bar, and pressed "send."

Paul's email address is his last name .dot. first name. I was soon terrified to realize that the "helpful" auto-fill-in feature put in his first name .dot. last name... which happens to be a different working email address sent to some other person.


All that information has been sent to a complete stranger! Who most likely has my husbands same name!!

To save you the headache of googling, sending the gmail staff frantic emails, live chatting with computer techies after midnight, and waking tired family members in the middle of the night... I'll tell you now that it is impossible to retrieve/intercept an email once you have pushed "send."

(Unless you've had the foresight to pay for a program that delays the sending of your emails... or have enabled the "undo" feature in gmail which allows you 5 seconds from the time you press "send" to "undo" the sending of the email.)

So beware!

In my shame, I sent another email to the stranger asking him to please delete the other emails and let me know they had been deleted, so that I could sleep better at night.

No reply yet.

Maybe no one uses the email address?? ;)

Today was spent calling banks, closing accounts, opening new ones, rearranging finances, and telling myself that that person with my husbands same name is probably a good enough person and won't use all of our personal information fraudulantly. Or dishonestly. Or creepily. Or at all...?? Pleeeeease????

On Whitepages.com I looked up Paul's name to see how many others there are. 21. Should I call them all? "Hello... what is your email address?? Did you get all our financial information sent to your inbox last night?? Will you please delete the message and erase any evidence...??"

I think I might...??

But what are the chances... right? I'm telling myself they're really, really slim so that I can sleep at night.

Really, they are slim. And I probably don't even need to worry. But just the thought of it all makes me nervous.

But what are the chances??

Phew... glad I got all of this frustration out in the open.

I feel much better now.

And please tell me you've pressed "send" when you shouldn't have... this stuff has happened to other people, right??