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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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BMO
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
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.
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.