The high cost of e-mail auto-complete

I've always been leery of Microsoft Outlook's autocomplete feature. That's the one that guesses who you want to send the e-mail to by looking at the first few letters you type.

It's right most of the time.

But with e-mail used to send everything from jokes, to family photos to corporate secrets, "most of the time" seems like far too low a bar.

Eli Lilly and its outside lawyers found out this the hard way this week when one of the esquires sent a note intended for a colleague to a New York Times writer with the same last name. (Note: I'm not certain which e-mail program the lawyer was using, and it's supposition, though a seemingly safe bet, that some sort of autocomplete was to blame.)

The result was that confidential negotiations with the government involving as much as $1 billion quickly became nonconfidential.

I try to always give my address bar a second look before hitting send, but once or twice have found my note to a colleague going to an outside contact with a similar name. Maybe Microsoft should get rid of the feature.

Then again, in a world where businesses and governments are increasingly secretive, maybe the typo has become the greatest opportunity for openness and democracy. On second thought, leave it in there.