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.

I never knew before this what bcc was for. And I have an ECDL!

I'm going to start using bcc to sneakily copy the big boss in but not let others see I have done.

If you can't beat them join them...

I forgot to BCC a group about a (work-related but not colleagues) night out I am organising last week and have been feeling mortified ever since :(

Oh if it's a night out it HAS to be CC otherwise how do I know whether there's anyone going who's a bit of a twat?

Heh. They mostly don't know each other anyway - and it is guaranteed at least some of them will be twats. Probably one will be trying to sell Forever sodding Living, and another will think he should be on the apprentice.

Ah well that's different- they would fall into the category of twats but relatively amusing so if there's free booze I'd RSVP yes.

I have also never heard of forever living. .. what is it?

non ASCII characters were bad apart from the period character when dreaming up email addresses.

The local part of an address can either be a string of alpha-numerics plus !#$%&'+-/=?^_`{|}~. with some restrictions (strictly, [email protected] and [email protected] aren't legal addresses), or a quoted string. So "My Name"@dom.ain is legal. So in principle, |[email protected] is perfectly legal, as is "My Name With Spaces"@dom.ain*.

All of this is ASCII.

The problem is that large amounts of email software is Palaeolithic (Sendmail dates back to the early 1980s and still carries a lot of the Internet's mail) and the security and general broken-ness implications of email addresses that aren't simple strings of letters and numbers can still be quite interesting. There are huge accretions of software which pass email addresses in and out of code written over the years, and a lot of it doesn't cope well with surprises. Throw in the usual problems with database security and web form security and the salutary tale of little Bobby Tables is relevant, which is why a lot of systems limit email addresses to rather safer combinations of characters.