I got email from Matt Prentice today.

I was pretty excited to see email come into our general "info@" mailbox from Matt Prentice of the Matt Prentice Restaurant Group. This company owns several restaurants including the very good Coach Insignia high atop the RenCen in downtown Detroit.

So, I eagerly opened up his email, only to see that it was an out-of office reply to a message I never sent regarding a 401k. So much for my dreams of signing on a new high-profile customer.

Email Etiquette Faux Pas #1

Some bonehead from Merrill Lynch scraped and collected a whole bunch of email addresses and sent out the following SPAM:

Hello everyone,

This is just a quick reminder that Merrill Lynch is conducting 401k reviews
and offering free for life IRAs.

We have been working with a lot of the downtown businesses and finding that
there is a lot of value to be added. Please contact for further
information.

Okay, so it is bad enough that (name withheld to protect the incompetent) sent this unsolicited message, but completely unacceptable that he put over 70 other email addresses in the TO and CC sections.

Email Etiquette Faux Pas #2

Why on earth would Matt Prentice's out-of-office reply be set to "reply to all" where exactly this kind of unintentional dissemination of information can happen. So, now all 70 of these complete strangers know that Matt is out of the office - and even why. His Administrative Assistant thought it wise to let anyone at all that sent email to him know where he was and how long he'd be gone.