Friends and family, please use the BCC option in your mailings!

Recently, someone at my sister-in-law’s school sent out an announcement to all of the parents, using a list of e-mail addresses maintained by the school.

The content was innocent enough, but when they sent out the mailing, they made a critical error: they had pasted the entire mailing list of addresses into the Recipients field in their mail program. As a result, every parent had every other parent’s email address. Some never noticed, and others didn’t really care. Several were displeased about this breach of privacy and let the school know about it.

That individual had committed the same error as many friends and family do when they want to share a message with many people.

This social faux-pas is easy to prevent, so I include here a quick set of instructions on how to maintain your mailing list’s privacy when you have a large mailing to send out.

What’s the problem?

When you send an email to a few dozen people, you risk the following:

• Some people might be upset because you are passing their private email address around in public. Treat the email list as if it were a list of private phone numbers. Would you send such a list to everyone you know?
• You are exposing everyone on the list to an increased spam risk. If anyone has a virus-compromised email account or is a spammer themselves (perish the thought!), they will now have access to the entire list of your friends.
• It is quite possible that someone in the mailing list will click “reply all” and either send personal information meant for you to everyone else, or at least annoy the others on the list.

Keeping it Private

The solution is very simple:

• Put your own address in the To field.
• Put all of your friends’ addresses in the BCC field—Blind Carbon Copy.
• Compose and send your email.

Your friends will receive an email that contains only your address and their address; they cannot see any of the other names on the list, even if they were to dig into the gritty details of the email headers.

Have Consideration

When you send a message to a large mailing list, please

• Keep their email addresses private
• Edit out unnecessary content of forwarded messages
• Respect their wishes if they ask to be removed from your list
• Carefully consider if your mailing is appropriate for everyone in the group

In other words, don’t become a spammer in your friends’ eyes.