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IETF Drops RFC For Cosmetic Carbon Copy

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the this-never-happened dept.

paulproteus writes "Say you have an email where you want to send an extra copy to someone without telling everyone. There's always been a field for that: BCC, or Blind Carbon Copy. But how often have you wanted to do the opposite: make everyone else think you sent a copy to somebody without actually having done so? Enter the new IETF-NG RFC: Cosmetic Carbon Copy, or CCC. Now you can conveniently email all of your friends (with a convenient exception or two...) with ease!"

10 of 63 comments (clear)

  1. This would actually be useful. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Although it is an April Fool's...this would actually be useful. I can see a couple times where CCCing a Boss or someone else would get things done quicker.

    I hate being a "tatle" but this would work to scare some people into action.

    1. Re:This would actually be useful. by BitZtream · · Score: 2, Insightful

      If you just want to trick people, I've found adding a:

      CCd To: (addresses here)

      in the message body accomplishes it well enough, it only fails if they actually think about it, which generally only happens if they already suspect you of being full of shit :) Most people however (at least outside the geek world) are too oblivious to realize its just text in the message.

      --
      Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
    2. Re:This would actually be useful. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

      A friend and I made a CCC. We did a fake reply-all. It was really just a reply to one person. Then he included something personally embarrassing, so the recipient would think it was accidentally sent out to every one on the list.

    3. Re:This would actually be useful. by rar · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I have actually wanted this feature at times and wondered why there was no way in the MUA UI to do it. Not for keeping people out of the loop, but for resending emails that get bounced (say, misspelled email or delivery failure) or to recipients I forgot the first time.

      Lets say that you are sending out a move invite to a number of friends. Just after you send it you notice that you forgot Alice. Now you need to send the invite just to her, but you prefer the email to look as the original so that she can see who else is invited. This is a common occurrence! And it would be very convenient if you could just bring up the email again, move everyone from To/Cc into Ccc, and then put her as the only CC.

      Please explain to me again why this is presented as an Aprils fool, rather than a genuine feature?

      --
      Open Materials Database
    4. Re:This would actually be useful. by johnw · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I've been amazed lately by the number of regular e-mail users who take no notice of any headers at all. Anything in the Subject: line might as well not be there, and I keep getting replies from people to whom I've Cc:ed something saying, "Who did you send this to originally?"

      There are are quite a few people out there to whom nothing but the message body exists.

  2. Enough April Fool's Already. by GrifterCC · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Do you seriously mean to tell me that there are no important tech stories taking place today? Most of these articles are barely even chuckle-worthy.

    1. Re:Enough April Fool's Already. by BitZtream · · Score: 3, Funny

      Just wait ...

      You're going to see a post from an unexpected new slashdot mod ... his/her post will be something like:

      I couldn't take it anymore. I've killed them all. Slashdot will now be closed because I had to save the world from them. I'm going to turn myself in now, you're all welcome.

      To which I suggest we all respond with donations to their legal fund.

      --
      Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
  3. Actually, it's the "CC" field. by tomhudson · · Score: 2, Funny

    IETF Bows To Environmentalists, Drops Email Carbon Copy

    In a measure that will help reduce both SPAM and glbal worming, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) today announced that they will be dropping the "Carbon Copy (CC) field from the email standard.

    Spammers will no longer be able to CC: hundreds of people at once, thus shifting more of the load from mail servers to individual zombie computers. This will allow for easier detection by anti-spam software runing on host systems, due to the several orders of magnitude increase in Internet traffic that will be required to send spam.

    In Soviet Russia, spam no longer CC's YOU!

  4. not the real April Fool's RFC by brunascle · · Score: 4, Informative

    This isn't the real April Fool's RFC. The real one is RFC 5841, TCP Option to Denote Packet Mood.

  5. You can already do this.. by geniusj · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Envelope headers are different than actual recipients. Mail clients don't implement it, but there's nothing in the SMTP protocol preventing you from putting a Cc: header in your message with a list of names/email addresses, but not actually delivering the messages. It's just a matter of a mail client offering this functionality. For now, you'll have to telnet into port 25 ;)