Use BCC: Blind Carbon Copy

b0b · From: Cloverdale, CA, USA

I don't support the idea of sending an email to everyone in your address book. Even if you know everyone well, it borders on spam.

But if, for some reason, you need to broadcast something to everyone you know, please don't put all of those email addresses in the "To:" field. It's a violation of everyone's privacy.

Instead of "To:", put the addresses in "Bcc:" (Blind Carbon Copy). That way, you aren't broadcasting everyone's email address to everyone else. The recipients won't see each others' addresses.

It gets worse when people start replying to the email. People reply using "Reply All", and everyone in the "To:" field gets the reply. It's like we've all been signed up to a mail group against our will, and there's no way to unsubscribe. Mad

This message is for the benefit of those novices who don't understand the difference between "To:" and "Bcc:". The computer literate among us have no excuse for this bad behavior. Mad

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Lee Baucum · From: McAllen, Texas (Extreme South) The Final Frontier

Good rant, b0b!

I've had to point that out to several people in the past. It's very annoying and, as you pointed out, it's an invasion of your privacy. I've ended up on the email lists of people I don't even know, just because of this practice. I get enough junk mail from my friends. I don't need more from strangers! Mad

Lee, from South Texas

Marc Jenkins · From: Victoria, British Columbia, Canada

No kidding! I work in a music store, and quite a few of the suppliers' sales reps do this. I keep emailing them, asking them politely to get with it.

They don't. Yeesh.

Dave Mudgett · From: Central Pennsylvania and Gallatin, Tennessee

Emphatically agreed! I periodically need to remind people of this, and some take extreme umbrage. Bcc: should always be used to send to more than a very limited target of recipients. Never, ever, should anybody send anything to a wide distribution using anything but Bcc. More here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_carbon_copy

Think of it like this - every time you send an email to a wide audience, it more than likely goes to their address book, which spyware can and often does harvest. In addition, a fraction of senders relay that or some new email to an even yet wider audience, and then a fraction of those relay to their now-expanded list, and so on. Sometimes, this can lead to exponential growth of the dissemination of your email address, and ultimately you know who gets it - genuine hardcore spammers, scammers, hackers, and who knows who else.

Larry Lorows · From: Zephyrhills,Florida, USA

I use the BCC and after I hit forward, I delete all of the old addresses which cleans up the email tremendously. It sometimes take a while to delete the old addresses but it seems to go out faster after I do. Larry
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Jeff Hyman · From: West Virginia, USA

It's healthy that many members here are getting an eye opening education on Cc vs: Bcc. To be more abrasive, one who sends to a large list using Cc looks like an idiot to those that know better... even when done without malice. Now... with all this new found knowledge, a Bcc is in many cases still considered SPAM by its recipient (and also an ideal way spread a virus).

I assume there are spam filters for windoze. I use SpamAssassin on Unix, and have also written a program to specifically loop a reply to the spammer to stop. I have noticed that if you politely fill up a spammers mailbox with 100+ requests to cease, it does get their attention. Sometimes fighting fire with fire works, but not always.

$.02

Jonathan Cullifer · From: Gallatin, TN

Most of the forwards I used to get I would do the "Reply To All" thing (especially if it was a virus warning or some other hoax) and call the sender out on it. Eventually I stopped getting those.

I also sent one back sometimes if there were lots of FW: in the subject line and >s in the message body. It basically asked the question, "If you printed this out and mailed it to someone, what would that say about you?" and then said that they needed to clean up messages before sending them.

Mitch Drumm · From: Frostbite Falls, hard by Veronica Lake

Bob:

You are dead right of course, but I doubt if your plea will have any effect.

Consider two phenomena related to mailing lists: top-posting and unedited responses.

Top-posting is where someone responds to your request for info on a topic by putting their response at the top of the reply, rather than lower, just under the original question. The next person to read the thread sees the answer before the question and typically has to scroll down a half mile to see the question. This would be like an SG Forum member contributing to a thread and then using the quote function to indicate what he is responding to AT THE BOTTOM, after the reply. Nutzoid.

In an unedited response to a mailing list, the responder simply hits the reply button and begins typing, and therefore includes pages and pages of earlier and irrelevant posts on the topic, rather than cutting out the unnecessary material and including ONLY the relevant part of the earlier posts.

I have seen hundreds of internet postings complaining about these tactics and yet they persist.

I often wonder how much Internet bandwidth is wasted purely because responses to a post are not trimmed properly.

It's not for no reason that there is a "Dnt Undrstnd" forum on this site. Do certain posters on this site remain completely impenetrable because they don't know better? Or do they know better and are indifferent? I have seen one poster string together 60 or 80 words with no punctuation or capitalization whatsoever.

Jonathan Cullifer · From: Gallatin, TN

What's funny too is the reactions people get when I send them a reply with my answers interspersed with their questions rather than one long message. Most people have never seen that before, nor have they thought to do it.

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