If you and your employees use Outlook, you can take one simple step now to dramatically reduce the risk of inadvertent sharing of confidential information: Disable email-address auto fill.

Everyone loves this feature. You type the first few letters of someone’s name, and Outlook fills in an email address. But the increased efficiency comes at a cost, as everyone occasionally sends an email to the wrong person whose name is similar to the intended recipient.

If that email contains confidential info, you’ve just compromised it. Hopefully, you sent it to someone friendly who will comply with your embarrassed request to delete the email. Even if there’s no confidential information, the recipients may question your ability to exercise discretion when necessary. (Also, imagine later trying to prosecute a trade-secrets action and having to produce in discovery an email sending the info at issue to some random guy.)

So I strongly recommend that you disable this feature. And have your IT department disable it for all employees. The relatively minor loss of efficiency is outweighed by the reduced risk of unwanted disclosure. And there’s an added benefit: not having to send sheepish apology emails to the mistaken recipients (and sometimes to the other intended recipients who now have an interloper privy to the discussion).

Here’s how you disable this feature:

File –> Options –> Mail –> Send Messages –> Deselect the radio button for “Use Auto-Complete List to suggest names when typing in the To, CC, and Bcc lines”