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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."
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.
It's useful when you're informing a large group of people that may not know eachother already about an event. For instance when sending out an invitation to a party.
It's just plain rude to share people's email address without their permission.
May we live long and die out
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.
Actual scenario, that I've been on the recieving end of: A company decides to send a mass-mailing to a group of customers. The employee CCs them all... and thus inadvertantly gives out half the company mailing list to everyone on it.
Have another read of his comment. He sent an email To: one person and Bcc: to that person's boss. The boss receives an email that does not have his email address anywhere in it. When the boss hits reply-all, the email will go to two people: the person who sent the email and the person to whom it was addressed. It was the boss who was in the Bcc field and hence when the boss hits reply, he doesn't send an email to himself.
There is no adding "everyone in by hand" because there are only two people who receive the boss's email and neither of them were in the Bcc field.
Sig matters not. Judge me by my sig, do you?
I don't know why FB doesn't implement "burning carbon copy".
Blind Carbon Copy Actually - unless this is another example of how the USA has diverged from English. In that case, sorry.
I'll see your Constitution and raise you a Queen.
Amen. I am not in the corporate world, being retired. But I am frequently the recipient of jokes and cute pictures and such which include long lists of email addresses of who knows who. And nested deeply through the 3 or 4 times the stuff was forwarded.
I feel very strongly that one should not willy-nilly expose email addresses in that way, so I carefully delete all that from any email that I forward on.
Frequently I will forward one of these to my friends and family, many of whom do not know each other. I then use BCC all the time so those friends are not seeing the emails of those they do not know.
And, very few of my correspondents do the same.
SMTP doesn't know "BCC". SMTP knows "RCPT TO". The MUA knows "BCC" and "RCPT TO" both because it speaks SMTP and also knows the mail content format for TO, FROM, CC, and REPLY TO headers. BCC is an extra version of CC that adds more RCPT TO requests to the SMTP session but doesn't add a header like CC does.
Unfortunately, since so many implementors included the completely non-standard capability of multiple recipients in the "TO" field, CC itself is terribly underused itself.
So now you know... and knowing is half the battle.