Do YOU BCC?

I am writing this to encourage everyone to learn about the "BCC" field and to learn how to use it. For a detailed explanation of email from Wikipedia, go to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-mail

When you send people email you can send it in two ways:

When you put the email addresses in the "To" field or in the "CC" field, everyone can see everyone else's email address.

But, when you use the "BCC" field, the system hides the addresses of everyone else.

Today on the internet BCC is used to hide email addresses so that you don't disclose everyone's email address to everyone else. This is a sensible anti-spam precaution because it avoids making a long list of e-mail addresses available to all the recipients.  See Wikipedia’s anti spam precaution explaination. 

Why should you hide the address of everyone else?  Because when you don't those addresses can get forwarded all across the internet.  When you send twenty of your friends an email showing all twenty email addresses and those people forward that email to twenty of their friends, suddenly 400 people now have your friends' email addresses.

Or what if every time your friend wrote a letter to their friends, they handed out your home address to people who didn't know you. And then those people handed it out to people that they wrote to. This is what happens when people send your email address to people who don't know you.

Are you writing 5 of your friends who all know each other? No problem. They all have each other's email address anyway. You aren't disclosing anything.  Are you in the office or in a business transaction? No problem.

But, the next time you open up that email that was forwarded to you with a joke, motivational story, funny cartoon, or even with one of the ubiquitous virus alerts, look through that email. See how many email addresses you can see for people you do not know. And as you forward that email across the internet to your friends sending those email addresses to spammers, remember that you know how to hide your friends' addresses to protect them.

When you write, remember that you can be spreading your friends' email addresses all across the internet. Learn how to use BCC. Then ALWAYS use it.

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BCC implementation:

Some ISP's won't let you send only to BCC. If you try to send only to BCC and your ISP bounces your email, you may need to put at least one address in the "To" field. Here is a trick: use your own address in the "To" field. You can either put your own address directly, or, if you want to be even cleverer, create an address in your own address book to use.

For example, you could create an address in your address book called "Friends" and give that entry your own address. Then when you want to use the BCC, put "Friends" in the "To" field and the real addresses in the BCC fields.

The email will show up addressed to "Friends". The other addresses will be hidden. 

Notice: WebTV does not support BCC.  See this entry  to confirm that information.