Slashdot Mirror
The Death of BCC
An anonymous reader writes "An interesting op-ed at NeoSmart discusses the demise of BCC in emails at the hands of Facebook and the like. It discusses how certain technologies that are slowly being supplanted by 'cooler' yet less effective alternatives have actually been spoiled for all, since they rely on a basic community-wide awareness regarding these technologies for them to work."
BCC was killed by spam filters, not facebook.
is competition good, or is duplication of effort bad?
Seriously, given all the people using email that don't know when to use BCC rather than CC or vice versa, I'm surprised it hasn't already been yanked.
Every single time I use BCC these days I think "this is gunna bite me in the ass".
That said, try to find an email program that gives any "help" or description of the functionality. Email software is arcane and unlearnable by the isolated individual. They really are a relic of a long forgotten time when people were introduced to computers with "training" provided by competent professionals, in a community where someone was available to provide gentle reminders of appropriate etiquette.
Yes, email is now our lightsaber.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Perhaps email clients could be modified to highlight, or give a textual warning at the top of the preview/document pane/window (much like our browsers today warn us about a site wanting to install an addon, and whatnot) saying that "YOU WERE BCC'D ON THIS EMAIL."
Default this feature to 'on.'
Ideally built-into the client; an easy-to-install addon/plugin would work as well but guarantee most don't have it.
is alive and well over here. TFA is an inane rant.
"f you're fighting with a friend and want to let your BFF know what's going on as you send your frenemy a nasty messsage — what's the best way to pull that off?" ...Better yet...why would you want to send hate mail to as many people as possible? BCC is an interesting feature, but this isn't exactly the best demonstration of its usefulness.
> certain technologies that are slowly being supplanted by 'cooler' yet less effective alternatives
You mean the way the Slashdot web 2.whatever comment system is inferior to any 90's USENET client?
I detest people who think my email address is so meaningless that they use it in CC field instead of BCC, and soon enough thanks to their ignorance and arrogance, I get spam email from the compromised Windows boxes.
Anyone that uses CC instead of BCC should be shot at dawn.
It is CC that should be killed off.
Take Nobody's Word For It.
Couldn't someone just write the Facebook BCC App and make money off it?
if you're fighting with a friend and want to let your BFF know what's going on as you send your frenemy a nasty messsage
Wtf does that even mean? Who is frenemy and what's "messsage"?
Strange, I see it used all the time - in the workplace, that is. For one thing, it's a very convenient way to "loop out" someone from a long-going email thread (when it's no longer relevant to them).
http://www.bbc.co.uk/
Table-ized A.I.
The only time I ever used BCC was to send a copy to my other me on some other account, whose existence I didn't wish to publicize.
I don't know why FB doesn't implement "burning carbon copy". Never been on the service, maybe that's also too much to ask people to understand. Perhaps the major downside is getting sued for implementing this by the visually impaired.
The upside of Facebook is that we can now explain dark matter to your average dim bulb: it's like a person without a FB account. It shows up on an abstract census, but there's no public record of its birth date, mother's maiden name, or SIN number, and it doesn't even interact with likinos, so for most practical purposes, it's not really there.
I send weekly emails to nearly a hundred admirers of my photography and just find that using bcc protects everyone's email addressses. Yes I know other technologies might seem better (blogs, rss etc) but this seems to work the best for us (eg many of the recipients wouldn't get around to learning even rss and setting up some notifier).
Bcc: is usually used for juicy emails. It's used a lot for CYA, and to keep certain people in the loop on touchy subjects. Whenever I get interesting emails I always check the to/cc fields to see who the players are, and who is involved. And if I'm not on there, you can bet I'm going to keep my trap shut until I need to say something.
Bcc: is alive and well; it appears that the author of TFA got burned by bcc'ing a clueless sot. You've got be careful on both ends...
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Yeah. Political bullshit.
Or . . . you know, an extremely useful way to keep someone apprised of communications without actually including them in communications. Say, when you are perhaps communicating information to a client and want an engineer to be up to speed on what is being communicated to said client, but you don't want to unnecessarily directly involve said engineer to the point that the client would just start spamming the engineer directly or that the engineer would start getting copied on every single piece of future communication in the thread.
Blind Carbon Copy is used all the time, don't let the lies fool you.
BCC is dead, long live BCC!
You mean, I won't be able to send out generic, "I love you Babe, you're so special to me!" emails to my multitude of girlfriends without them finding out about one another anymore? Oh the horror!
*insert Slashdot virginity jokes here*
Motorcycles, Robots, Space Gossip and More!
As the other poster pointed out, there are LOTS of us using it in non-political bullshit ways every day. It can be very handy. Just because YOU don't use it or have a need for it, doesn't mean others don't. I don't use facebook, but I understand other folks find it useful.
People like him. The guy seriously believes that people are the problem, not the poorly designed email clients and protocol (then totally confuses himself and bizarrely hurls the blame at Facebook). If BCC was the best solution to the problem (that is, the problem of, er, betraying your friends), then it would work. As he demonstrates, it doesn't. Regardless, he pig-headedly believes it is because it works just fine at his end, and hey, nothing that's been around since the command line can be a bad thing.
Carl is just mad that someone found out he couldn't keep a secret. If someone tells you a secret, you need to keep it to yourself, and not worry about how you can share the secret and not get caught.
Mail programs should insist on BCC if there are more than say 8 addresses. I'm tired of getting mail with a TO: list a mile long. One of the people will have an infested computer and everybody will be put on a spam mailing list.
I've seen BCC used to send bulk company-wide emails out to all of the employees so if anyone tired to reply to it, only the original sender would be the email as opposed to the entire company.
Their reporting has gone bonkers to the point that when those bastards say it's raining you bloody well have to look outside and check. Their world news is so bad we might as well send the license fees to Finsbury Park. The Daily Fail is starting to look respectable in comparison.
Oh, were you talking about something else? I am sorry, I must have spoken in error. Yes, the Borland C compiler was quite the product in its day...
Reply All to 13,000 people
OK, here's a counter example that I use BCC for all of the time:
I frequently email a list of people some data such as links to a photo gallery from a recent trip, friends & family events, that kind of thing. The recipient list will typically vary slightly every time and, since it is most likely a one shot deal, there's not much point setting up a mailing list. Out of common courtesy, since not everyone on the list is going to know everyone else, I use BCC so that just in case one or more of them has been pwned, the entire list of email addresses won't get harvested and everyone will get spammed even more than usual.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
What is this I don't even
...BBC? I couldn't watch pron with only skinny white dudes in it. Bcc I can live without
Great! I can add one more reason why I don't use Facebook: I'm helping to keep Bcc alive.
If you want to reach me with a group e-mail that looks like it is only going to me, you will just have to blow the dust off that Bcc header.
Bcc is useful when you're sending an e-mail to many people without intending to start a virtual mailing list discussion where people can "reply all".
It is essential in situations where you need to ask a bunch of people some personal question where an accidental "reply all" leads to embarassment.
Someone else pointed that out as well, that is a nice counter example.
while [ 1 ]; do echo -n -e "\xe2\x95\xb$((($RANDOM&1)+1))"; done
It took reading the summary twice for me to realize this story wasn't about the Borland C Compiler. I couldn't figure out what the hell Facebook had to do with the best cross-platform C compiler and library ever written.
I was actually just talking to my Domino admin the other day about BCC:. Every chance he gets, he reminds our users about it. Almost nobody knows what it is, can't imagine a use case, and thus fail to even try - until we give them a couple of good solid examples.
Poor means hoping the toothache goes away.
I dunno...that's certainly not a malicious use of BCC, but what do you do when the client responds with a clarification or correction? You have to remember to forward that response to the BCC'd engineer. CC would be much more useful. You can put a disclaimer that all communications should go through you, or instruct the engineer to reply with the same if contacted directly. The kind of bullshit I've seen it used for more than once is people BCC'ing their own or the recipient's manager, instantly creating an awkward situation for all involved.
while [ 1 ]; do echo -n -e "\xe2\x95\xb$((($RANDOM&1)+1))"; done
BCC was dead ages ago because nobody hardly ever learned to use it. It was dead before Facebook. It was dead before the large influx of spam. It was dead about the time Gopher came out.
Ever get a "chain forwarded" email with hundreds of email addresses of people you don't know?
That's because nobody uses BCC. Nobody ever learns how to trim FW: lines either. FFS, nobody ever learns to reply in-line with quotes. Replies are all top posted, mostly because of that crawling horror called Lotus Notes and that other crawling horror Exchange. Nobody ever learns how to trim replies either - a one line top posted reply to 10 screens of text or multiple forwards? Sure!
The death of BCC is not because of Facebook. The death of useful email features is because most people are unwilling to learn, rude, or stupid.
--
BMO
Global CPU condition codes for program logic are largely dead because they are hard to parallelize.
In modern instruction set architectures, CPU flags are for things like interrupt masks and privilege modes, not for "the most recent arithmetic instruction produced a carry". :)
[cover my ass], often, esp. w/ committees when we're not supposed to discuss something, but someone inevitably tries to drag my ass into an email conversation. To be polite, I respond with a bland 'we should discuss this at the next meeting' and cut the original post except the header, and BCC to at least one other member to prove I didn't start any conversation, and don't intend to be part of one.
is the rise of the "consumer centric" tech model. One of the things I miss about the old Gates era MSFT is how you had the business line in WinNT and the consumer line in Win9x. With the line split like that those that didn't want the bling bling BS and just wanted a corporate centric desktop had it, while the consumers got the bling bling hand holding.
Now and with the rise of Apple it has considerably gotten worse, is everything made for the home user FIRST and business second. If TFA is correct and BCC is dying it is just another proof of consumer centric (as consumers don't know WTF BCC is) as opposed to business centric design. in the old days business users were first and foremost in the design then afterward you might make a consumer friendly version. Now everything is flipping 3D bling bling transparent windows which is about as useful to businesses as tits on a boar hog.
So if anyone is to blame it is the sudden switch to consumer centric design. You just don't get anything mass market designed for business anymore, it is all being designed for Joe and Sally home user and business is an afterthought. Some may prefer it that way but I miss the days of low resource grey apps that just got the hell out of my way and let me work. Should I tell everyone to get off my lawn or do others miss it as well?
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
i LIKE the BBC! It's got Top Gear!
There is simply too much glass..
When I needed a coworker to her job I would email BCC to the boss just to let him in on whats going on and to at as prove later on if required.
It covered my butt a couple of times because since I am the "tech" at my work, I could easily fake an email, so by sending at the same time my butt is covered if a dispute occurs and the coworker never received my deleted email. (I hate people playing politics at work)
And on the plus side, the boss would think I am hard working and motivated while the other is troublesome.
I don't know that I've ever used blind carbon copy on a personal email, so whether or not I use Facebook's messaging instead is not relevant. I DO use Bcc in work emails, and I have a hard time believing Facebook messaging is going to supplant email for the workforce.
I'm guessing the submitter has not yet entered the workforce? That seems like a blindingly obvious miss on his part.
#DeleteChrome
BCC (and BBC) are alive and well. This article misses the mark.
"BCC is dead"... because NeoSmart says so?! W(ho)TF is NeoSmart?
On their page, About gives a very meaningful result:
"Oh no! You're looking for something which just isn't here! [..]"
Oh, OK then. Trustworthy source.
Sadly this is why ccc was also dead on arrival: http://www.ietfng.org/draft-jhuacm-cosmetic-carbon-copy-01.txt
They have such interesting programs on TV and radio. Even the news on their website is good.
Chaos maximizes locally around me.
yeah, and the net's dead too.... not everybody thinks everything should be broadcast - unless they have a facebook account.....
Maybe if you were not playing BS politics, you would never find a BCC'ed email to be awkward. You also are totally naive about customers.
If you give a customer an email address, you better expect them to use it. Telling them not to send emails to the person that definitely knows the answer because it should first go through someone that might know the answer is going to be taken by some as you telling them that their time is unimportant. It doesn't matter if you are right or wrong. Making your customers feel insulting when it is totally unnecessary is not good business.
god... it took 20 comments before I realized this wasn't the BBC...
Counterexample: A large organization has an IT staff that is shared across several autonomous (and potentially competing) business units. Some member of the IT staff must now send a message to all business units about a particular piece of technology that is considered "sensitive" (i.e. it's exposing too much to even know who uses it).
Solution: email the IT group itself and other "shared" resources. BCC all business units, with a comment in the email to that effect. Privacy between business units is maintained. "Reply All" keeps the discussion isolated to IT plus a single business unit, where it belongs.
Yes, you could use some sort of mail-merge to send the same email out to each group independently. So BCC and Mail-Merge have some overlap in the functionality they provide. That's OK.
In order for something to kill BCC, that something would have to be as useful for serious correspondence as whatever email client I am using at the time. Facebook is several orders of magnitude less useful than real email - especially for me since I don't even have a login on facebook - so no, it will not change how I use BCC.
That said I don't use it very often. The times when I have a use for BCC are so rare I can't even think of the last time I used it. But I use it less because I don't need it; not because I have something that I would use instead of it.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
As a project manager or customer-relations manager given this scenario, your priority should be preservation of your engineers' privacy. It's better to guarantee that with BCC—with the added cost of remembering to forward replies appropriately—because that's your job. A disclaimer or policy can always be ignored.
That's a good point but look, the bottom line is you can achieve the same thing without BCC or CC and just deliver requirements to your devs outside of the conversation with clients - you might have it the other way, a dev needs to know some inane API detail and grabs an client email address from the mail and ends up annoying the CTO of your client. If I copy people on an email to clients it's usually a support team member that I fully expect to be able to handle all aspects of direct communication.
while [ 1 ]; do echo -n -e "\xe2\x95\xb$((($RANDOM&1)+1))"; done
I used it recently to send a couple hundred emails with myself as the recipient and BCC'ed to all the people that needed to receive it (not worth doing a list since we only had to email them once). No BCC means any replies create a reply storm, no thanks.
If you give a customer an email address, you better expect them to use it.
On the flip side, if you surreptitiously give a developer a customer email address, you better hope they don't use it.
Maybe if you were not playing BS politics, you would never find a BCC'ed email to be awkward.
Someday after you learn to admit that you do not know everything and some company lets you have direct reports you'll find out that people are wildly unpredictable and do all kinds of stupid things to put you in bad situations without you having breathed one political breath in your life.
while [ 1 ]; do echo -n -e "\xe2\x95\xb$((($RANDOM&1)+1))"; done
I think we're dereiling ourselves... the bottom line in this thread is that BCC is not dead, because are still many legitimate uses for it.
if it is really interesting, you don't need the word "interesting" - your writing should demonstrate that in any event, why would you have a /. article on a non interesting thing ?
Agreed on both points :)
while [ 1 ]; do echo -n -e "\xe2\x95\xb$((($RANDOM&1)+1))"; done
When I was TAing a class in Grad school, I used BBC for mass mailings to my students. No reason to give all of them the others addresses.
That said, I was initially wondering what Facebook could be doing to bring down the British Broadcast Company.
Nobody cares about BCC very much, that's why its dead. Personally, I miss NNTP. I blame Slashdot for the death of NNTP.
You think BCC is dead? It isn't. Here's what I ran into.
I put a filter on emails on my mail server mandating that the "To:" field exist and be filled in with an email address. Certainly fixes those spam emails to "undisclosed recipients". This seems reasonable and straightforward right?
Nope. Next thing I know I've got people complaining that their emails aren't going through, because they're sending emails with a long list of recipients BCCed only, and the email isn't actually "To" anybody at all. I tried to explain that all they need to do is send the email "To:" themselves, but nooooo, that's just too complicated. :-(
Used correctly, and used with people who UNDERSTAND IT, BCC is a feature. Used incorrectly or sent to people who DON'T, and it's a hindrance.
I use bcc at work for replies to clients that certain internal people need to see.
NNTP is still around and there are quality newsgroups such as for computer language development (many with two-way gateway to subscribed mailing list)
Hey, I'm not worried about BCC: being "killed" by Facebook. I'm worried about e-mail getting killed by Facebook.
It's like having to be a member of AOL just to e-mail someone.
While the article mentions Facebook, it has nothing to do with Facebook. The BCC: problem he mentions is a "problem" with mail clients, not the competition. This BCC: trouble could be neatly solved if all mail that arrived in your box not actually addressed or CC'ed to you was highlighted, or the client simply inserted a yellow bar above the display text saying "This mail was sent to a different address, listed mail recipients do not know you have this information, and will not see your mail address." It's not a bad idea for the next Thunderbird, in fact.
--
Toro
Complaining about top-posted replies vs inline replies is just stupid. Top-posting the reply is standard practice now. Every client I use does it, from generic school mail to GMail.
If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits
The problem is that BCC should have been the default, and CC should've been the special one. Because if everyone sends to everyone all the time and the reply-all list grows with every forward, it doesn't take many hops before everyone's valid emails get sent to a spambot. Not to mention the plenty of situations where you might want to send something to a bunch of people, but you don't necessarily want everyone to know who everyone else is. And the bigger the list, the bigger the chance that some dumbass is going to f' it up and forward the whole thing to the wrong person.
How big a chance? It's already High when N = 1. I suspected it approaches certainty before leaving the single digits.
The default should've been the behavior of BCC, unless some kind of deliberate, "let everyone see everyone else" flag is enabled, for those few times where the information you want to send everyone IS the address of everyone else.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Especially since there was another frontpage story that said "Science Channel buys Firefly" and the BBC (america) is the main channel that shows SF* these days since the renaming and demise of the ScIFi channel
BBCA has ST:TNG and X-Files in addition to their own SF shows like DR Who, Torchwood, Primevil, and Being Human...
Anyway back to the intended subject, I don't use FaceBook, and I do use Thunderbird, and It still hac BCC
The point of the blog post seems to be that since Facebook doesn't offer BCC, people aren't using BCC anymore. It makes the rather bizarre assumption that Facebook has supplanted email. That's simply not true, as a glance at anyone's email inbox will reveal. In fact, it's a laughable presumption.
If you send me a facebook message when you could send me email instead... seriously, fuck you.
I'll have to disagree with some of your points.
Inline replies and trimmed reply histories often work fine on mailing lists with few distinct threads, but in e.g. a workplace environment when I'm on dozens threads any given day, anything that obscures the thread history just makes my life difficult. I want to be able to see the full thread history when I receive an email.
Trimming replies will cause new people added to a thread to lose context. Also, it's far easier to scroll down in an email than to find the previous email in your inbox (if you still have it!). It's not like the memory waste from long emails is a burden on modern computers.
Inline replies just make a big mess of who wrote what and when. It's appropriate when several distinct points are under discussion, but I still like to see the unedited, uninterrupted text of the previous email included.
IMO the "death" of bcc is well-deserved. It causes confusion (why did I receive this email?), if not trouble (replying to a thread you weren't supposed to be on), and subverts mail filters (e.g. I want to file emails from certain lists into a separate mailbox; if it's bcc'd then that doesn't work). It's ok for announcements where reply-all makes no sense, and it's great for removing people from a thread that's no longer relevant to them, but otherwise there's no upside to BCC versus just sending a separate copy of the email to your intended BCC recipients.
It is still horrible to have top replies without a trimmed body. Especially with all the wonderful 50 line long law footer BS in each and every mail.
"Freiheit ist immer auch die Freiheit des Andersdenkenden" - Rosa Luxemburg, 1871 - 1919
Bcc is still extremely useful for keeping the contents of my address book out of the hands of others, spammers included. This doesn't require any of the recipients to understand that.
BCC was dead ages ago because nobody hardly ever learned to use it. It was dead before Facebook. It was dead before the large influx of spam. It was dead about the time Gopher came out.
Ever get a "chain forwarded" email with hundreds of email addresses of people you don't know?
That's because nobody uses BCC. Nobody ever learns how to trim FW: lines either. FFS, nobody ever learns to reply in-line with quotes. Replies are all top posted, mostly because of that crawling horror called Lotus Notes and that other crawling horror Exchange. Nobody ever learns how to trim replies either - a one line top posted reply to 10 screens of text or multiple forwards? Sure!
The death of BCC is not because of Facebook. The death of useful email features is because most people are unwilling to learn, rude, or stupid.
--
BMO
Huh? What? I use BCC and trim all the time. Just because "everyone" is not doing it doesn't mean some people aren't doing it and using email effectively.
My father is not what one would consider a technology friendly person, but he understood what BCC is for and is using it right. It took a few months and a few mistakes. And now he teaches others to do it. So I think most people don't use it, because they don't even know it exists or don't understand the problem caused by it.
One nice thing I've noticed: the group of those who don't use BCC, almost 100% interesects with the one of those who send me hoaxes (in a top posting, hotmail/yahoo style forwarding with the headers of past messages containing previous senders/recipients). It's very practical because I can answer to everybody and point them to http://hoaxbusters.org/ or like (using BCC this time).
Sneak teach kids Algebra using a game
an artice based on brain farts instead of fact, stats , numbers or basically anything. if you think something is dead just because you or your idiot friends dont use it, or dont know how to used it it DOES NOT mean its dead. real people just use it as they have been the last 20 years.
For the very same reason.
Yes granddad, when you were young the abacus ran on only 1GB of RAM and if you wanted to install a program you had to put a coaster in the drink holder.. you already told us this one
It's even worse. I Do not top post, but most non tech people try to explain me every time that I should top posting, because it's better and because that's what "everybody is doing".
Disgusting.
I love how the author of TFA tries to make the point of BCC being dead by demonstrating a case wherein the "victim" of BCC is a guy who abuses trust and gets caught. Using BCC to inform friends of how you betray another friend may not be the best use of BCC.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
>Especially with all the wonderful 50 line long law footer BS in each and every mail.
Those always make me laugh. They have absolutely no legal power whatsoever. At best they are contracts of adhesion. What they really are is intimidation. If I accidentally mail something to the wrong person, it's not their fault, it's mine, and they can do whatever they want with it. The "if you received this in error blah blah blah" lines tacked on are just wasted electrons.
Someone having a bad day would be more tempted to post an errant email to 4chan /b/ that has the threatening footer than one without. Politeness breeds politeness. Asshole legal behavior begets assholes.
--
BMO
Everytime someone sends me a chain mail with a CC, I make it a point to reply all and admonish them to use BCC and tell the one who cc'ed it to me to not be an idiot and stop sending me crap.
I may be a jerk when it comes to idiots on emails, but it works well.
I hardly get someone chain mailing me another time.
There are Federal agencies that configure their MTA's to forward the BCC: header along just like CC: If someone from the Forest Services BCCs someone on an email to you, you'll see it in the headers you receive. I don't know if it's because their admin is an idiot, or if he was directed to do so.
BC has been dead for thousands of years. We have been using AD for 2010 years now. Try to catch up, people!
I use it everyday, and most of my co-workers do. And of course it's mostly useful at work, where you don't use Facebook to communicate. Hopefully. This sometimes leads to funny situations where the BCC'd recipient answers some mail he wasn't "supposed" to read, by the way.
Jicehix
n/t
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
I was a hotshot English coach in Milan, and helping this big marketing director write perfect emails. (outlook). So I was sitting there doing them with her. She kind of had a routine where she would send an e-mail, then immediately go into her sent e-mail and forward it to other people she wanted to see it. "Why didn't you just CC them?" She said, she didn't want the people getting the e-mails to know about the other recipients. "Why not use BCC?" She said, because it would appear sneaky.
I kind of had a facepalm moment. But then I thought about it, and you know what: she's absolutely right, it does appear sneaky. I have never once used BCC since then (ever, for any reason). Now I go into my sent email and click "forward".
It's very practical because I can answer to everybody and point them to http://hoaxbusters.org/ or like (using BCC this time).
... or you could even set up a procmail script that does it automatically for you.
Facebook isn't e-mail. I use BCC, and so do many other people; it still works just fine. Just be happy these tards can actually send an e-mail and don't need to call you for help with that.
Important Privacy Notice: If you copy email addresses for use in another email program, you must use those addresses in the 'bcc:' field when sending email to ensure that student email addresses remain private in accordance with FERPA policy.
Inline replies are fucking annoying, especially when the mail grows with multiple people answering inside the text.
Putting it on top gives a very clear history of whats been going on and it makes it a heck of a lot easier to read through if you need to catch up on something (e.g. someone else has been making a mess and it has been escalated).
I've been top-posting replies since the 80's. It simply makes more sense to me. It would be an interesting Slashdot poll to see the breakdown of preferences for top vs. bottom replies in emails.
(See topic.)
he only said anything about Facebook to get more views.
or?
AND.
BCC was dead ages ago because nobody hardly ever learned to use it. It was dead before Facebook. It was dead before the large influx of spam. It was dead about the time Gopher came out.
That's funny because the most popular email client around, Outlook (cringe), still supports BCC. Gmail still has bcc. Yahoo still has bcc. For a dead technology it sure is implemented in tons of current software.
-- QED
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Forget BCC...you can't forward a message in FB, either. If my friend sends me a link as a private message and I want to send that to another friend - I have to create a new message and copy-paste the link to them. FB messaging works fine as sort of a text message replacement. But I don't see it supplanting real email communication any time soon.
.... as do other social networking sites. Because they want the complete distribution list for all communications to support their link analysis/marketing initiatives.
Have gnu, will travel.
...the dumbest I've read on /.
Congrats!
Kind of like that whole blog / forum thing that took over the more elegant usenet...
Comment removed based on user account deletion
n/t
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Speak for yourself. I literally use BCC every day and sometimes many times a day. I guess I am neither a subset of nobody or everybody, at least according to your email.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer