Three little letters: the importance of BCC
Calvin September 2nd, 2008
Image via Wikipedia
Using the BCC (Blind Carbon Copy) field when sending e-mail to multiple recipients is common courtesy and protects people’s e-mail privacy. Not using it is not only bad e-mail etiquette, depending on your jurisdiction, it could even be against the law. Here’s a quick overview on how to use this useful, but often overlooked e-mail feature.
****
We’ve all done it at one time or another… used our desktop e-mail client to send a group e-mail to a list of people in our address book. But how many of us stop to consider which address field we put the list into? Unfortunately if it goes into the To or CC field when you hit send you essentially share all of those e-mail addresses with everyone else on the list without the owners’ permission to do so.
And that’s a BAD thing!
Using BCC keeps people’s e-mail addresses confidential
There’s absolutely nothing wrong with using your regular e-mail client (the application you use to manage your day-to-day e-mail) to send messages to small groups of people. It’s quick, convenient and most mail clients make it incredibly easy to set up and manage e-mail distribution lists precisely for this purpose.
But when you’re dealing with other people’s confidential information (and yes, e-mail addresses fall into that category) you have to be careful.
Consequences of not Using the Bcc field
- Sharing people’s e-mail addresses without their permission is wrong, it damages trust, tarnishes your reputation and could be against the law.
- If anyone on the list hits “reply to all” instead of just “reply” their unsolicited message (Spam!) is sent to everyone on the list.
By putting your mailing list into the BCC field you simultaneously solve both these issues.
Here’s how you use the BCC field on two popular desktop (Mozilla Thunderbird) and web-based (GMail) mail clients. Others will vary slightly but in practice the process should be very similar:
