Is it possible to send an e-mail to the sender of every message in a particular folder?

[IwishIwasmoreorganised]

I've advertised something on Freecycle and have been absolutely inundated with replies.

I would really like to send one reply to all of the unsucessful people who have replied, but don't want to spend all night doing it!

I've put all of the messages in one folder. Is there a way to send them all the same message at the same time?

A qualified 'yes'.

If you are planning to do this, find out how to use the 'BCC' field. It is normal for e-mail applications / web services to offer the sender fields for "To:" and "CC:" and "BCC:" (though the latter two might not be visible all the time, and may require you to click something like 'Show CC and BCC' to make them appear.

The "To:" field is obvious - it's the intended recipient. "CC:" stands for 'Carbon Copy' (think of the Carbon paper on a typewriter to make a copy of the original letter/ document). Recipients you list in CC all see the other names.

"BCC:" is for a 'Blind Carbon Copy'. This means that everyone who is listed gets a copy of the message, but they only see the name of the person in the "To:" field, not each other.

Why use BCC ? So that the private e-mail addresses of everyone who sent you a message is kept private - you know who they are, but they don't see the other names. This means you won't get complaints about having made their e-mail address "public".

You can probably put your own e-mail address in the "To:" field. If not, feel free to use one of my mail addresses: [email protected] (I use it as a place for 'spam' to go and get thousands of items a day, so probably won't spot your message!)

So, you will need to copy the sender e-mail addresses from each of the mail messages you received. Just open Notepad or Wordpad (or any other favourite for keeping brief notes)

Collect the addresses and then put them into the BCC field, separated by commas.

I would suggest a maximum of say 15 addresses at a time. If you prepare your message in your word processing package (I use something called EditPad which can have a number of text files open at once, like several copies of Notepad or Wordpad) then you can first copy a list of mail addresses into the BCC field and then type the Subject like 'Sorry - the has been collected, and then copy and paste the text of your message into the 'message' area.

My reason for writing a "qualified yes" is because some ISPs have limits on how many recipients you can send to. They don't always say how many are allowed (indeed, 15 might be too many, so include your own e-mail address and if you don't see your message come back, you will know your ISP didn't send the mail!

Too many and they assume you are a spammer (tough if you try to send invitations to a party to 25 people and the ISP just throws your message away - for that reason, it may be worth adding a family e-mail address so you can check it went out from your ISP).

Finally, good luck (oh, and well done for using Freecycle).

Thanks very much for this.

We had loads of replies, and I do like to reply to everyone whether they've been lucky or not.