Have you ever hit “Send” on an email, and in that fraction of an instant had an epiphany that you accidentally hit “Reply to All” or addressed the email to the wrong party? Oops.

While some email programs have a feature that allows for a message to be recalled, that functionality usually relies on two things- 1) the recipient must be on the same mail server–in other words someone in your same organization, and 2) the recipient must not have already received and opened the errant email message. Typically, what happens is that someone tries to recall a message and the errant recipient receives a notification that the sender would like to recall the email message, which just piques the recipient’s curiosity and draws attention to the fact that there is some reason the sender does not want you to see the message. Its not a very good system.

All of that is a long way of getting around to a recent data breach incident that occurred in Ireland. An error occurred in merging account data into emails which resulted in the wrong account information being sent to various parties and compromising the data. Since the account data merging was an automated process, it seems fair to assume that the sender did not actually have an opportunity to review and approve each email prior to transmission. It seems that the Tralee Town Council was not aware of the problem until it was too late.

One way to ensure that sensitive or confidential data isn’t accidentally emailed out–and maybe prevent that “oops” feeling one gets when realizing sensitive information was emailed to the wrong party–is with Zgate. Zgate analyzes the contents of all fields in the email, including the body and file attachments, ensuring that sensitive information remains secure.