An All Time Low

On 10 am Thursday September 5, 2002, a New York office worker, Tripp Murray, sent a chatty email to Mary Callahan, a woman he’d recently taken on a date, asking if she intended to go to a Bon Jovi concert that night and if not suggesting himself as company.
He was surprised to receive a reply [...]

A Grade A Date

In 2002 Jacqueline Kim made the mistake of emailing her unusually materialistic assessment of her date (good kisser, nice car, needs to get a haircut and shower her with presents if he wants to keep her) to a few friends outside her office – some of whom promptly forwarded it on for the delight and [...]

Bad council

In October 2006 David Clutterbuck, a 72 year-old Conservative councillor, found himself the laughing stock of the nation thanks to a joke he forwarded on to fellow council members at Bournemouth Borough Council.
Ironically enough, the joke itself was determinedly unfunny: a description of the trouble Noah would have floating his ark nowadays thanks to the [...]

Baring all

Someone from an audio company wrote to me asking if I could “bare” to send him a book written by a client of the literary agency I work for.
I forwarded this message on to a colleague with a note saying I didn’t mind sending him a book but I certainly wasn’t going to bare anything [...]

A terrible message

I once snorted to a friend about a technician’s terrible spelling in an email (at Oxford University, no less).
Naturally I hit ‘reply all’ by mistake, and sent the guffawing tirade back to the technician. Oops.
andybman

“We were well and truly stuffed”

A classic piece of newsroom sensitivity, sent to this website by an anonymous donor with the following message:
“Whenever I want to remind myself why I left news reading, I only have to take a look at this. The bit I like best is ‘foot-in-the-door tactics are not our style’ (it was – totally) followed by [...]

“5 down, 1,000,000,000 left to go…”

In May 2001, Peter Chung, a priapic recent Princetone graduate and a new employee of the Carlyle Group in South Korea sent an email about his numerous recent conquests back in New York. The rest is internet history – as was the unfortunate Mr Chung who soon found himself looking for a new job.
So [...]

Am I the worst boyfriend in the world?

When Trevor Luxton asked a few fellow employees at Credit Lyonnais the question “Am I the worst boyfriend in the world?” he could hardly have expected that within hours the whole world would be in a position to answer. Thanks to the power of the internet, however, that’s exactly what happened…
The message
Last night I was [...]

Yum-yum

The Claire Swire email.
In the year 2000, Claire Swire became an internet phenomenon, her email to a male acquaintance, Bradley Chait, informing him that his sperm tasted “yum”, reaching millions of email inboxes within hours of its initial sending. Scroll down to see how the story unfolded…
Email one – a little joke
From: Claire [...]