to think that people should use BCC when sending mass emails?

[Hygellig]

I've received a few emails recently addressed to a relatively large number of people (around 30-40). The email addresses are all in the "to" or "cc" field, so shared with everyone. There's been one from DD's playgroup, which asked us to give us an email address to save on printing costs - I was happy to do that, but didn't realise they were going to share my email with all the other parents. Another was from a music class I'd taken the DCs to in the school holidays; the person running it had my email from when I'd booked and then included me in a mass email about her future classes.

Quite possibly I'm being a bit petty over this and there are other more pressing IT concerns I could worry about. However, I thought it was good practice to BCC people, both for reasons of privacy and to have a tidier email header; this is what I've done in the past when emailing large groups of people.

"So, if I wanted to send an email to 10 people and protect the privacy of all, do I just choose one for the top and BCC the others and they all get an individual copy?"

I wouldn't do it like that, because you are still breaching the first person's address (unless they have consented to your sharing it).

But it's dead easy. Send the email to yourself.

Add everyone else in the BCC line. Yes, they all get a copy (just like all CC addressees do) and they cannot see who else has received it.

(It's almost exactly the same, really, as using CC)

I see, thank you.
I thought CC was different as its not blind as so if you CC then it's all in view. So I might send an email to school and CC my dh so he knows what I've written. They can also see that he's been copied in. But if I BCC'd him then they wouldn't know if copied him in, is that right?

But thanks for the tip to email myself. As a teacher I quite often send confidential emails but never to groups and if I'm copying in another agency then it's always transparent to the parent.

God this drives me barmy and lack of awareness is no bloody excuse either. For a small business it makes me wonder what other regulations or laws they are completely ignoring.

I'd definitely draw their attention to it and I wouldn't be overly polite in pointing it out, probably with a direct reference to the size of fine the ICO could inflict on them, tends to concentrate the mind a bit.

LurkingHusband am I right in thinking that the original specs for email deliberately excluded the use of extended character sets in addressing? Sticking to just alpha numeric makes life an awful lot simpler particularly if you run up against a system that sticks rigidly to the original RFC.

I told the school office (nicely) not to do this and they took it quite well. I've also accidentally done it myself and been told off nicely by a recipient (we now use a mailing service). But the PTA insist on ccing "so that everyone can discuss ideas with everyone else". Not appropriate for a group of more than 100 people IMO.

Friends who all know each other organizing a meal out = CC

Business email or an email to people hwo don't all know each other = BCC

I don't even know what that means. Bcc, whats the difference? Did everyone get the email that was meant to? If so where's the issue?

I had this problem a few weeks ago. We adopted a cat from the RSPCA about a year ago, and I recently received an email about a fundraising event. The only problem was that they had sent the email to 70 people in one go, so I could see all the other recipients' email addresses and 69 strangers could see mine. I try to keep my email address as private as possible and don't want it shared around.

I emailed them back to say what they had done, and they apologised, so hopefully it won't happen again.

Sproke, my understanding is that if you CC then you are openly copying someone in on the email and both recipients can see that and see each other's email address.

BCC is blind carbon copy so those listed under BCC cannot see anyone else's email address. It's a privacy thing to be used by organisations were the recipients are not known to each other.

Where

LurkingHusband am I right in thinking that the original specs for email deliberately excluded the use of extended character sets in addressing

Er quite the reverse. The original spec (RFC822) and it's successor both allowed this specification:

quote

3.2.4. Atom

Several productions in structured header field bodies are simply
strings of certain basic characters. Such productions are called
atoms.

Some of the structured header field bodies also allow the period
character (".", ASCII value 46) within runs of atext. An additional
"dot-atom" token is defined for those purposes.

atext = ALPHA / DIGIT / ; Any character except controls,
"!" / "#" / ; SP, and specials.
"$" / "%" / ; Used for atoms
"&" / "'" /
"*" / "+" /
"-" / "/" /
"=" / "?" /
"^" / "_" /
"`" / "{" /
"|" / "}" /
"~"

atom = [CFWS] 1*atext [CFWS]

dot-atom = [CFWS] dot-atom-text [CFWS]

dot-atom-text = 1atext ("." 1*atext)

Both atom and dot-atom are interpreted as a single unit, comprised of
the string of characters that make it up. Semantically, the optional
comments and FWS surrounding the rest of the characters are not part
of the atom; the atom is only the run of atext characters in an atom,
or the atext and "." characters in a dot-atom.

endquote

But there are some quite crap coders out there who insist on rewriting their own email address validation routines - and getting it wrong.

With the current push for internationalisation it seems likely the updated spec will be expanded to cover non-ASCII characters. So expect a tsunami of really crap coding.

For those that care, I used variants of this as one of my interview questions. If a candidate had said "hang on", googled, and then mentioned RFC822 or 2822, they would have been hired on the spot !

My (real) name is in an RFC from 1987

Wow, history lesson here.

"CC" means "Carbon Copy". In the days when letters were typed, it was an instruction to the typist to make a carbon copy (ask your grandparents) and send a copy to each person listed. The "c.c" would be shown at the bottom of each copy, so all recipients knew who was in on the secret.

"b.c.c." was an instruction to Blind carbon-copy. That is make a copy that only the originator, and the "b.c.c" recipient would be aware of. It may have been done for simple archival purposes. Or (more often) it was a quick way of keeping more senior personnel in the loop in a sensitive manner.

When I did my sandwich year at Uni, I must have been the last person who sent something to the typing pool !

I have no idea. Don't use email much. Is it really such a problem tho? Kinda like your number bring in the phone book and people can look it up? If it's an organisation isn't there some kind of address book where you can look up people's email addresses anyway? I'm just failing to get why it's an issue. I can't say I would be massively bothered if any of you were to see my email address despite not knowing you in real life.

OP, YANBU
I hate it when people don't use bcc, and I'm not in the phone book, I see one poster has mentioned that.

I have an email address for personal contacts which is separate from one I use for anything official or business, so that's another solution.

Yanbu
It drives me nuts but I suppress my pissed off'ness and send a polite and friendly email to the perpetrator explaining what to do or asking that my email be removed.

My (real) name is in an RFC from 1987

I'm on the GNU Emacs distribution tape from 1986. So there.

I'm a brownie leader and I always BCC the parents. It irritates me when people don't!

I'm just failing to get why it's an issue.

Well I hope you have no duties at work which involve using personal data such as email addresses!

So many issues with it - didn't see the big thing the other week about the HIV clinic that CCd everyone???

It's an issue if, as one of the pp said, there's a Forever Living spammer on the mailing list.

I have no idea. Don't use email much.

So why post ?

I never knew the difference between cc and bcc before so always just used cc

Thanks for this thread - it's been informative!

YANBU. I thought this was work related, and I was going to say how useful it is to link straight to that person via Outlook etc. But out of work? I wouldn't be impressed.

Because like mamamary I didn't know the difference and this is something I would probably do. Just put everything in the to bit. Never knew about the rest. I work on a farm and in a garage so I'm not up with the technology. All I have to do is order parts online. Everything else is in a big diary and the receipts are hand written.

Thanks for quoting the RFC LurkingHusband takes me right back I've vague memories of the mail sysadmins telling me non ASCII characters were bad apart from the period character when dreaming up email addresses.

For those asking why it's a problem on professional mails it breaks data protection as emails are classed as personal details. If the ICO get involved then prosecution may follow, if you are lucky it's a fine of a couple of grand but if they decide it's a severe breach like the HIV clinic example above then the fine can be 100s of thousands. I can't remember if the law allows for a jail term or not. It's really serious stuff.

Large mailing lists of personal stuff should definitely be BCC. Another Brownie leader here and we have to (though then we get millions of "do you have Elsi-Marie's mum's email to arrange a pick up"...)

But in work BCCing someone is generally sneaky and makes you a bit of a twat. Love it when the BCC-ee replies and the whole thing is exposed...

Wow... that's all waaayyy over my head I answer the phone, I ask when the rig is coming in and I open the book to that page and mark it in. Occasionally iy will require a specialist mechanic and if so I open the hatch and yell at the top of my voice several times until said mechanic comes to take the phone from me then stare at him with the evil eye for invading my workspace doubt amy of the luddites I work with knew this either