Sins of The Internet: Not Using Bcc
This is a little known yet very important issue on the web. Many good people commit this every day without knowing that there is an alternative, and without having any understanding of the very real damage that they are committing.
How many times have you received or sent an email with an address like this:
To: You@anywhere.com
Cc: Yourfriend@noone.org; Myfriend@anyplace.com;
Looks fine, doesn't it? Except for some simple facts. By including email addresses in the Cc field you are inadvertently helping spammers. Even worse, you are violating the basic privacy of everyone to whom you have sent the message. In fact, in the worst case, you may have put all of these people in danger.
Huh? How can this be? This just a simple email!
Let's say you send this email to twenty friends. Each of those friends will receive the email addresses of you and all twenty of your friends. All of those email addresses will be conveniently listed at the top of the message for everyone to see.
If one of your so-called friends is actually a spammer, you've just given him the email addresses of nineteen other people. He can add those to his lists and send spam messages to all of them. Even worse, these are very valuable email addresses, as they are confirmed and known to be good. They can actually be sold to some spammers for a fair amount of money!
Okay, let's say your friends are all fine, upstanding people who do not spam. You have still put all twenty people in danger. How? Email is not private by any means. In fact, your message will wind up on at least a couple of machines by the time you read it, and might actually find it way to thousands of them!
Don't believe me? I worked as a consultant for a company several years ago. One day one of my fellow co-workers called me over to his system and asked me to look at something, a wide grin on his face. He had been working on our clients email system to fix a problem and accidentally listed out the email message file. He showed me a series of several hundred very explicit emails that two employees had been sending to each other for months! These two people would have been very embarrassed, I am sure, if they ever found out that we read every detail of their love affair - it was extremely x-rated in places!
So you see, your email may actually be read by anyone at any of those systems at any time! Thus, by including all of the addresses in the "cc" field, you can easily give away them away to spammers.
Now, here is the dangerous part. What if it's not a spammer who gets this message, but someone dangerous? There are many people on the internet (as in the real world) who are not so nice. Someone could send threatening messages to your friends. They could pretend they were you, or they could forward your message to other unscrupulous people.
Okay, that's the problem. Yet you want to send your message to several people! How do you do so without compromising the privacy of everyone else?
That's easy. You see, your email program has a special capability called Blind Carbon Copy (bcc for short). This allows you to enter the email addresses of anyone you want, without sending all of the addresses to everyone else on the list.
It's basically a way
to send a copy to someone without telling anyone else that you did it.
This is commonly used in a corporate environment to send a copy to someone
who needs to know without alarming the rest of the people who receive the
message. For example, I might want to let the Vice President know about an
issue, but I may not want everyone else to know that I clued him in (in a
office, copying senior management tends to produce office politics very
quickly as everyone scrambles to protect their behinds).
Sometimes email programs hide this option. To find it, just go to the help and look for "bcc" or "blind carbon copy". The help will tell you how to turn it on. Usually there is some option to show the Bcc field directly under the Cc field.
So be considerate of other people's email addresses. It's the ethical thing to do.
Want to help spread the word? Include the following code on your website to add a cool ribbon!
The ribbon links to this article, which will allow anyone to get the information they need.
<a href="http://www.mailmsg.com/bcc.htm">
<img src="images/BCC.gif"
width=98 height=191 border=0></a>