Don't Click Send! If you've heard it once, you've heard it a hundred times. It's the story of an e-mail message that came back to bite its sender in the backside. Some people never learn. Who hasn't hit "Reply to All" when they meant for only one person to read their witty retort? Who hasn't forwarded a chain letter, only to incur the wrath of people they hadn't seen in five years, but whose e-mail address they happened to have handy? And who hasn't sent an off-color joke and wondered, belatedly, "Gee, I wonder if Betty will be offended?" Liens Commerciaux They're all mistakes. And what some people may not realize is that sending the wrong e-mail to the wrong person can be more than monumentally embarrassing. It can cost you a job, or even a few months in jail. If you're composing an e-mail message that resembles any of the following disasters, just step away from the keyboard and go for a walk to clear your head. 1. "I hadn't [CENSORED] for years, but yours was [CENSORED] and very good for me too...." Thus began a sexually explicit e-mail sent by Claire of London to her boyfriend Bradley at a prestigious law firm. Evidently the boyfriend forwarded it to six friends, who forwarded it to their friends, and so on, until millions around the world were intimately acquainted with Claire's sex life. A hoax? Maybe, although press reports said the boyfriend was actually disciplined by the law firm, which subsequently issued a new e-mail policy. The lesson? Save salacious details for your memoirs. 2. "YOUR URGENT ASSISTANCE IS NEEDED...." Scam spam, like this classic, should die in your inbox. It's a popular gimmick, in which a deposed leader or some other citizen of (usually) an African nation wants to give you millions of dollars. All you have to do is get in touch and, eventually, let the person know where to wire the funds. Don't expand the potential circle of victims by forwarding these messages to friends, no matter how blatant and silly they are. 3. "Check out these hot pix I found on [insert Web site here]." Dow Chemical, Hewlett-Packard, the New York Times, and hundreds if not thousands of other companies have fired employees for shuttling pornographic e-mail around the office. Take a cold shower instead. 4. "My boss is an @$$#?!?!! and you can tell him I said so." Odds are you won't have to tell him--there are a dozen ways he can see your message, from e-mail-scanning software to other employees accidentally (or deliberately) forwarding it to him. Better to do your complaining at the water cooler. 5. "Here are 25 reasons why beer is better than women...." This e-mail probably seemed a lot funnier to Chevron staffers before four female employees sued the company over it, charging sexual harassment. That joke cost Chevron $2.2 million--roughly $90,000 per reason. 6. "Attached please find your payroll information and home address...." It's always a bad idea to put sensitive information in e-mail. Enron employees found this out the hard way, when the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (news - web sites) posted 1.6 million company e-mails online as part of its investigation into the company. Included along with the relevant business e-mails were employees' performance evaluations, salary packages, bank account and social security numbers, and discussions of romantic liaisons. FERC later removed some of the more personal messages from its database. 7. "We strongly suggest...you should catch up on file cleaning." Thus concluded an e-mail sent in December 2000 urging Credit Suisse First Boston employees to destroy evidence requested in an SEC investigation. As a result of that e-mail, investment banker Frank Quattrone has been sentenced to 18 months in prison for obstruction of justice. The moral here: Breaking the rules is bad. Sending e-mail detailing how you broke the rules is worse. But sending e-mail telling people to delete all evidence describing how they broke the rules could make you an involuntary guest of the federal government.