Autocomplete, the Eli Lilly SNAFU, and You

Have any of you sent an email to the wrong person because of the autocomplete feature in your email client? I'm guessing the answer for many is yes. I've certainly done it. While embarrassment is one possible result, it can be far more severe: witness Eli Lilly's dilemma.

Last week The New York Times' Alex Berenson wrote about confidential settlement talks between Eli Lilly and federal prosecutors over the company’s marketing of the antipsychotic drug Zyprexa. Confidential. So how did Berenson get that info?

Autocomplete did it. One of Eli Lilly's lawyers at Pepper Hamilton in Philadelphia wanted to email Sidley Austin's Bradford Berenson, about the negotiations. But autocomplete gave her The New York Times' Alex Berenson instead.

At first Eli Lilly thought the government leaked the info, but after the truth became evident, they - and Pepper Hamilton - were red-faced.

What does this say about your own emails? (Since your business email will likely use Outlook - and that's where you can get into the most trouble, we'll talk about that).

You should at least double-check your emails when autocomplete offers up an address. You should also delete extra entries in your list of "autocomplete-offered" names (select the extra name and hit delete in Office 2003 or 2007).

If you want extra control, you can use the freeware tool NK2View (written by Nir Sofer). Outlook stores the autocomplete addresses in a .NK2 file. If you use NK2View - and it doesn't even need installation; you can just run it - you can look through the file and delete extra addresses easily.

For the ultra-paranoid, if you want to disable autocompletion completely in Outlook (2003 and 2007):

• In the Tools menu, select Options.
• Go to the Preferences tab, click the E-mail Options button
• Click the Advanced E-mail Options button
  
• Clear the "Suggest names while completing To, Cc, and Bcc fields" check box

Viola. You should be safe, at least from Outlook-generated addressing errors.