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The Death of BCC

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the fog-of-flamewar dept.

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."

5 of 366 comments (clear)

  1. It's dead? by shutdown+-p+now · · Score: 4, Informative

    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).

  2. Gonna miss that site by Tablizer · · Score: 4, Informative

    http://www.bbc.co.uk/

    --
    Table-ized A.I.
  3. Re:So true by Kidbro · · Score: 5, Informative

    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
  4. Re:BCC still existed? by ladadadada · · Score: 4, Informative

    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?
  5. Re:Nope by mr_mischief · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.