An email that you sent to a wrong recipient

IELTS Cue Card/ Candidate Task Card 422 with Model Answer:

Describe an email that you sent to a wrong recipient.

You should say:

• when it was
  
• what type of email it was
• whom you wanted to send it and whom you actually sent it
  

and explain what you did about it.

[You will have to talk about the topic for one to two minutes. You have one minute to think about what you are going to say. You can make some notes to help you if you wish.]

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Model Answer:

In this age of computers and the internet, I mostly like to use email in order to communicate with other people. But, on rare occasions, I have seen that my emails have ended up being sent to the wrong recipient, and today, I would like to talk about one such occasion.

This incident happened about a year ago when I was trying to send an email to a good friend of mine to get some information on the ticket price of a domestic flight. By the way, this friend of mine works at a big travel agency, and he often helps me with such information, especially, when the domestic flight carriers offer big discounts on their tickets. The reason, of course, behind asking for such help is that I want to save some money on my next flight.

But, on that occasion, when I sent that email to my friend, I didn’t get any reply from him for the next couple of days which looked a bit unusual to me. In fact, in the past, he had always got back to me in the next few hours. I thought that he must have been too busy or something to reply to me, and so I decided to wait a bit more. Then, after two days, I did receive a reply to my email, but that reply came from some school teacher from another city who had the same name but with a different spelling. In other words, my fat fingers didn’t spell the name of my friend properly on that occasion, and as a result, my email ended up being in the inbox of a wrong email address.

But, as soon as I became aware that my email was sent to a wrong recipient, I immediately apologized to him and also thanked him for notifying me about the incident. Later on, I emailed back my friend again except this time around, I checked the spelling of his email address at least a dozen times before hitting the “send” button.