Ken Martin’s Blog

Most people, when sending an email to a large group of people, simply go to their To: or Cc: field and start entering names. This is dreadful. It’s terrible. You must never do this.

Why? Because if I am one of fifty people in that list of recipients, then you have just shared my email address with a bunch of people that I don’t know. Let me emphasize that: you will have shared my email address. Grrrr.

This takes my carefully meted out email address and lets it out onto any number of unknown computers, where, when they get struck with viruses, may in turn be sharing my email address with hundreds more people. And so on.

I do not want “I thought this was funny” email from people I don’t know. (I rarely want them from people I do know.)

I do not want the increase in spam which is the result of an email address becoming more and more public.

I do not want other recipients of the same email to think we are now “related” enough to start including me in their bulk emails.

I don’t want my email address wrecked.

If, after careful consideration, you must send bulk emails, do this:

• Put your own email address in the To: field. Nothing else.
• Put everyone else’s email address in the Bcc: field.
• Leave the Cc: field empty.

This will protect everyone’s email address and allow the messages to get through.

And stop bugging me.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 28th, 2006 at 8:00 am and is filed under Tech.