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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."
BCC was killed by spam filters, not facebook.
is competition good, or is duplication of effort bad?
The crux of his point isn't that people don't know how to use BCC, although that's part of the problem. His point is that even for those who do know how to use BCC, recipients don't know what BCC means.
Here's a typical example of things I've had happen. Someone sends me a misguided nastygram at work over something that I have no control over. I reply to them basically saying, "I can't do anything about this, you need to contact x." Also, because I know they've been dog-cussing me over it to their boss, who is good buddies with my boss, I BCC his boss so that I can 1) let him know that the stuff he's hearing is unjustified, while simultaneously 2) trying not to agitate someone who's already bothered by looking like I'm needlessly escalating something to his boss.
Unfortunately, his boss is also a dipweed, and next thing I know, he's done a "Reply All" and said something like, "Hey, make sure you call x today, because we need this up and working for close of business."
Now, not only does the person know I sent the e-mail to his boss, but he knows that I did it surreptitiously, and he's even more pissed off than if I'd just CCed his boss on it so that he would know.
Having said that, I do wish that people would learn how to use BCC. Here's another typical scenario we have happen now and then:
Someone sends out some dumb little, "Hey everyone, we're having a party in the marketing group tomorrow, so bring in some food!" Unfortunately, they make two mistakes: 1) They accidentally send it to the entire company, including offices in Europe, Asia, Africa, etc., and 2) they address it in the To: or Cc: field instead of Bcc:. Next thing I know, I'm being inundated with, "PLEASE TAKE ME OFF YOUR DISTRIBUTION LIST!!!11!11!!" e-mails. And then after that come the inevitable deluge of, "PLEASE STOP REPLYING TO ALL!!!11!11!!" e-mails. The first one isn't so bad, but then there's this global e-mail flame war that breaks out between the people saying they want to stop getting e-mails and the people who are fussing about the people who want to stop getting e-mails. Sometimes it even descends down to a third, people fussing about people fussing about people who don't want to get e-mails, level.
I never cease to be amazed by how dumb people can be.
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.
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?
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
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.
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.
Reply All to 13,000 people
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?
BCC doesnt show other recipients, so if your boss scenario actually happened, either you don't know how to use BCC yourself, or he added everyone in by hand.
I think it's you that doesn't understand how BCC works, the parent poster's scenario is quite possible (and has happened to me)
I send:
From: Johnny Five
To: Stupid Coworker
Bcc: Big Boss
Dude, Stop sending me porn, I don't want to see it.
My Stupid Coworker doesn't know I Bcc'ed the boss since he doesn't see the Bcc list, however, if the Boss does a reply-all, then stupid Coworker gets this email from him:
From: Big Boss
To: Stupid Coworker, Johnny Five
>Johnny Five wrote:
>
>Dude, Stop sending me porn, I don't want to see it.
Don't send porn to Johnny, send it to me instead.
Now Stupid Coworker knows that it was me that reported him for sending me porn.
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.
--
BMO
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.