to think if schools email out newsletters, they should keep the addresses private?

[OrlandoWoolf]

Have they not heard of BCC?

Yes they should. YABU.

Just a mistake, I think. But it is confidential information.

yanbu, that's a bit poor

They have done it again today.

I emailed them last week and asked them to do a BCC.

But obviously that's too difficult.

But it is confidential information.

And as the home PCs of random people are likely to be virus- and botnet-central, your email address ends up being harvested by the bad guys.

If I had primary children now (it were all paper in my day, 'ey oop), I'd create a second email address, forward it to my real address, and give the intermediate address to schools. Then I could change it when necessary without too much hassle. Luckily, my kids' secondary school, like most secondaries, outsource parent communications and the people they outsource it to aren't idiot enough to expose every parents' email address to every other parent.

YANBU, might be worth reminding the school of their duties under the Data Protection Act.

Our primary does what Friday16's secondary does; uses ParentMail, which is a third party system so no one sees anyone's email addresses.

Your school needs to be pulled up on this as it can also cause people to use 'reply all' and send 1,000 emails by mistake.

Well the secretary apologised for what happened. But I still think she does not understand how to do a BCC.

Can you offer to go in and show her? It's dead easy to do, but if you don't know how it just seems like another mountain to climb

Or, if you think it would help (depends on the dynamics of the school) put your request in writing to the head (explaining that you have asked office staff once but no action resulted) and say you will consider a report to ICC if your confidential information is disclosed to third parties again.