Whether you belong to a church, ministry,school, club or just have an email address(!), you’re bound to have had suffered from the email which has been sent to you and about 100 other people!
Well, as techies (or even if you’re not!), it’s about time that people were educated into the wonderful world of using BCC – Blind Carbon Copying.
The Magic of BCC
BCC and its cousin CC (Carbon Copying) are leftovers (but very useful ones) from the days of typewriters (remember them?!). If you wanted to send one typed message to more than one person, you’d use carbon paper to enable typing onto multiple pieces of paper. That was a CC. But if you wanted to send multiple messages, but didn’t want some of the recipients that other (hidden) recipients were getting the message, as well as using CC, you’d BCC the hidden recipients.
Most people using email now have never used a typewriter, let alone been in an office environment when CC & BCC were commonplace. So ‘To’ has become the defacto way of adding addresses – hence the huge long list of emails…
But using BCC is really the best way to send those round robin emails!
So when you get one of those emails with all the emails addresses, you can send the sender to one of these sites – to educate them to the fact the BCC is your friend!
How do you educate errant emailers?!
Kevin at SiteWizard LLC says
Yes, BCC is a convenient way to hide your email list so your recipients can’t see each others’ email addresses. Technically, you can send a message with BCC filled in and “To” left blank. However, I usually put one of my company’s addresses in the To line so the message doesn’t look spammy. I think it looks odd for the recipient info to be empty.
Most email systems also support distribution lists or multi-recipient aliases to make it easier to keep sending to the same group of people. That saves time over selecting people from your address book each time. If you want to get really fancy, most email marketing / CRM solutions can send personalized emails to each recipient, taking advantage of group email delivery while but still allowing individual personalization. I’d say that’s the best option for marketing oriented emails. But I still rely on BCC or a distribution list for everyday use.