Whether you’re running a business, club, or simply marking assignments it’s likely that you will have available to you some level of personal data. In the business case this may be quite a bit of data. You are hopefully aware of the importance of storing and securing such information. However you should also be cautious in how you work with it as this little tale shows.

A few years ago I piloted a new venture concept that had been rattling around my head for a couple months. It shall remain nameless only because the idea is experiencing a major overhaul. I spent quite a bit of time making updates and improving features based on the customer feedback I was receiving and often went through filling out web forms over and over to test features. Needless to say testing was tedious at times.

One lovely day I made some really cool changes to the mass mailer tool that customers would be able to use to mail their members. It had been debugged and was ready to make live. Of course I had made it a policy to test everything on the live product to make sure it had been integrated correctly. That’s just good practice.

Being an efficient developer I included a special admin-only checkbox on the mail form which when checked would go through the entire mail creation process but not actually mail anyone. I didn’t take into account user error though.

My first test didn’t work, prompting me to fix a minor detail and refresh. I then went through the entire mail send process using a quick ‘lol’ as my message text and other nonsense for subject and from. Thankfully none of it offensive as hitting send showed a peculiar result. The screen I received was the actual mail sent screen instead of the normal debug notice. My stomach tried to flip inside out.

1000 people were now the receivers of a completely nonsensical e-mail with my business name in the reply-to field. Even as I set about writing a paniced apology mail I had begun receiving replies ranging from confusion to anger to accusations of spam (what they thought this ’spam’ was trying to sell them I’m not too sure but I never received any of the cheques).

Needless to say this wasn’t the greatest experience for my new business and the effect it might have had on company reputation kept me worried for a good week. The story does have a happy ending though. Most people were surprisingly understanding and with no actual harm done even the most infuriated users quickly forgot. I did rewrite the test function though.

It’s a good idea to pay careful attention when a little user error could lead to embarrasing or devastating results.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 10th, 2006 at 12:21 pm and is filed under Websites, e-Commerce. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.