Using BCC in e-mails 

BCC is the option that you have when sending an e-mail to more than one recipient.

This can be an original message from you, or one that you are forwarding to a group of your contacts.

I digress, but, really, do you need to send on those chainletter kinds of e-mails that you receive? I understand if you're a shut-in and correspond with a group of other shut-ins, and these messages are the way that you stay in contact with the rest of the world, but the rest of us probably don't want to have them cluttering up our inboxes and are just too polite, or are too fond of you, to say anything about receiving them.

What we want to tell you is to just stop it.

And, not just because we think that they are silly at best and pretty darn annoying at worst. Sure, we want to make the world a better place. We want to find out how many of our friends think enough of us to send the message back to us and all over the place. We are sympathetic to the suffering, hopes and dreams of little children with catastrophic illnesses or injuries. We may even be interested in why men are like household appliances, what kinds of things make women crabby, how cute those puppy stories are, the ten thousand uses for mayonnaise, and theories about friendship, shopping, politics, terrorism, and health.

We are also interested in keeping our e-mail and other personal information safe and far away from all the other people to whom you have sent or forwarded that message. And the people to whom they have forwarded it, and the eventually hundreds of people who will then have access to our e-mail address.

If you really are my friend, I want to share some information with you. This is a copy of a message that I sent to all the recipients of a forwarded message that I received from a very close friend. It was sent only after I made several requests to be removed from her group e-mails. I have received many replies from the people (all of them strangers to me) on my friend's list, thanking me for the information.

Please feel free to share the essay portion with anyone who may be sending forwards and/or group e-mails to you.

Oh, and if you think that it is difficult or time consuming to discover all kinds of information about anyone for whom you have a name or e-mail address, I simply used Google

Dear friends of M., Please excuse the intrusion of this message from someone who is probably unknown to you, but all of us were on the "TO" list of a recent e-mail message. There are many reasons to use "BCC" when sending group e-mails or forwards. At the end of my message is a short essay explaining some of them. However, to prove the point, I'm going to tell you a few things that I was able to find out, in mere minutes, about some of the people who have their e-mail address listed in the "TO" portion of the original message. For example, a couple of you work for mental health organizations. Several of you work for public agencies. One of you likes birds. I have found the church affiliation for a few of you. I found some of you on online auction sites and message boards, genealogy sites and more. We have, on this list, performers, artists, educators, business and medical professionals. I have found your full names, your addresses and even your telephone numbers. I know where you work and I know where you live. I also know that your information is safe with me because, save for the purpose of this message, I would not have used your e-mail address for anything, not even to send you a cute message that someone else sent to me. Clearly, I am not the person about whom you have to worry. I am not particularly computer savvy, but I didn't have any trouble finding many details about you. However, lots of people are, and those are the people who should be of concern to you. By the way, you (yes...YOU) can find out all kinds of things about me. Why? Because you have my e-mail address. And, I haven't hid anything, just to keep things fair. Please feel free to pass this message and essay on to anyone you like, especially if someone you like is forwarding cute e-mail messages to you, and consequently sharing your e-mail with, ultimately, hundreds of strangers. Our world just isn't the safe place that it used to be. That is a sad, very sad truth. The Internet isn't any different; in fact, you can be sure that there are plenty of people out there, with little to occupy their time except for causing mischief, mayhem and worse for trusting, honorable people like you. I know they're out there, because I have to work, every day, to keep them out of my websites. M.'s friend (hopefully not ex-friend), Juds

Use Bcc on forwarded e-mails Net safety...using BCC is an abbreviation for "Blind carbon copy." If you add a recipient's name to this box in an e-mail, a copy of the message is sent to that recipient, and the recipient's name and e-mail address is not visible to other recipients of the message. Instead of using the "To:" space on your e-mail, consider using the "Bcc:" box when: You want your mailing list to remain private. You want to protect your recipients from possibly getting on a spammer's list. Consider this: If you send out a message to 10 people (and you don't put their e-mail addresses in the Bcc: box), if each of those 10 people forwards it to 10 other people, and if each of those 100 people forwards it to 10 more people, your original 10 e-mail addresses are now available to 10,000 strangers. Chances are pretty good that one of those recipients is a spammer, or worse case, is infected with malware. It is also important to delete all the other e-mail addresses and names when you forward a message. If your e-mail system does not allow you to do that, at least take the time to copy and paste the heart of the message you wish to share, into a new message, making sure that you remove all those other addresses and names. Another point to consider is that if an email is sent to you and there is a BCC list that you cannot see associated with it, and you click "Reply All" when answering the email, everyone on the BCC list will get a copy of your response. Stick with "Reply" if you want to keep your email address private or are sending a confidential response to the original message. If all of this seems over-protective and a pain to do, then, perhaps, there isn't much heart in the heartfelt message that you wish to share. And, if offence is taken from the sharing of this information, please understand that it is shared with the intention of keeping all of us safe on the Internet, please accept our apologies and we will not be upset if you remove us from your forward list. MSN, Hotmail, GMail, Yahoo! and most other system users should find the "Bcc:" readily available in the header of their outgoing, new message form. If you use Outlook or Outlook Express, and you don't see the BCC line when sending out messages, do the following: Click on "Create Mail" then click View on your menu bar and go to All Headers ... now you should see the Bcc: option along with the To: and Cc: