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."

Comments

Re:So true

[Kidbro]

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.

Re:Nope

[mr_mischief]

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.